Chris Lee's first thought after seeing the Millennium Falcon was a bit different from Luke Skywalker's.
"When
they walk down the stairs into the docking bay and Luke looks up and
goes, 'What a piece of junk!' - as soon as he said that, I had the
opposite reaction," Lee said. "I was like, 'It's not a piece of junk.
It's the coolest thing I've ever seen. I've got to have me one of
these!'"
Lee's dream, hatched when he was a 12-year-old watching
the first "Star Wars" movie in 1977, wasn't simply a boyhood fantasy. It
just might come true one day.
The Nashville man and other fans
around the world have started building a full-scale, 114-foot-long
replica of the Millennium Falcon, the clunky but speedy spaceship that
carried Skywalker, Han Solo, Chewbacca and company around that famous
"galaxy far, far away." They plan to make both the exterior and interior
look exactly like what's seen in the movies, down to every last button,
switch, antenna, quad gun and hidden compartment.
"This is the
real thing," said Greg Dietrich, 43, a graphic artist who has been
building the ship's cockpit at his home in Huntsville, Ala., since
April.
These fans admit they're operating at, well, a fairly high level of geekdom.
"Our
great-grandkids will be rolling their eyes at us," said Lee's fiancee,
Leah D'Andrea, who pronounces her first name the same way as the
princess played by Carrie Fisher.
"It's kind of hard to impress a woman when you're building a spaceship," joked Dietrich.
But, like anyone with a true passion for something, they don't really care what anyone else thinks.
Lee,
a lifelong builder and tinkerer who oversees software development for
Anode Inc., said he thought for years about building a model or making a
room look like the Falcon. He finally decided to go big -- really big.
"Now it's looking like it might actually be possible -- with the help of a few thousand of my friends," he said.
Lee, Dietrich and others, after connecting through the Internet, are
operating out of their own garages and work spaces for now. Offers to
help have come from far and wide, including an executive at Elstree
Studios in Great Britain, where the movies were made.
Stinson
Lenz, who studies art and works for a nonprofit organization in
Philadelphia, designed the virtual model for the entire, full-scale
ship.
"One of the big pleasures of the project is finding all the
little secrets of the Millennium Falcon's construction, both inside and
out," Lenz, 26, wrote in an email.
Eventually the far-flung Falcon
tribe will gather in Tennessee and move the many parts to an 88-acre
property Lee owns in the woods of Humphreys County, west of Dickson.
Lee
is having a 400-by-400-foot area cleared for the construction site. He
said the Millennium Falcon would stay there, and he's thinking about
what else the place could become: a nonprofit, perhaps, or a "maker
camp" that encourages all kinds of creativity and construction, with
"this spaceship out in the middle of the property."
"It's going to be one of those tinkering, sort of garage-mechanic situations where it's never going to be done," he said.
'Star Wars' fans
This is nothing new for Lee, though the order of magnitude is much different this time.
He's
a member of the 501st Legion of Imperial Stormtroopers, a group of
"Star Wars" costume enthusiasts. He and D'Andrea met at a Dragon Con
convention in Atlanta six years ago, and he proposed to her at the Star
Wars Celebration last summer in Orlando, Fla., by giving her a replica
of a necklace worn by Princess Leia. It was made by the same Finnish
jeweler who fashioned the movie prop.
Lee has built his own R2D2.
(He's in a group for that, too.) He refers to the whole robot, a
250-pound magnet for children at parties, as "him." There's also a
"disco stormtrooper" outfit, complete with LED panels, that he wears to
some events. In the backyard sits a trailer with a picture on the side
of Lee dressed as a biker scout and two friends outfitted as
stormtroopers. A sign on the trailer reads: "Star Wars: Orlando or
Bust."
The Falcon project is "just an extension" of that kind of work, Lee said. "It makes real that imaginary universe."
Lee
said he expects the whole project to take at least five years and cost
anywhere from $200,000 to $800,000. Dietrich, who hasn't met Lee in
person yet but plans to soon, said he hasn't kept up with his own
expenses.
"It's such a labor of love that the cost really doesn't matter," he said.
That
labor of love started with figuring out the true dimensions of the
Millennium Falcon. Lee and Lenz said the cockpit and other interior
rooms were built to a larger scale than the ship's shell on the "Star
Wars" sets. They and other researchers came to almost the exact same
conclusions about the space that would be needed to accommodate the
interior.
"As far as I know, no concrete numbers exist, so there's
a lot of extrapolation that has to take place," Lenz wrote. "The length
of the original sets was a bit more than 86 (feet) and for our
purposes, the length will be 114."
The ship will be built with a concrete foundation and piers and a steel beam superstructure, the group's website
says. Sheet metal, plywood and other materials will be in the mix as
well. Dietrich said Canyon Wren, a man who lives in the United Kingdom,
is making resin copies of the more than 400 switches on the cockpit
console. Lee has parts from an old Volvo and a Rolls-Royce aircraft
engine.
While Lee said the process of building the full-scale
Falcon is in some ways more important than finishing it, he did take
note in October when Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion and said it
would restart the "Star Wars" franchise.
"Maybe they need a set," he said.
USA Today