These actors didn’t expect much from what they expected
would be just another job, they were left out of the initial mania when Star Wars turned out to be much more
than that, and they finally got a taste of it on the fan convention circuit
years later. The film is most interesting during the twenty minutes that they
describe their experiences working on the film, revealing George Lucas’s somewhat
dehumanizing grading system for placing auditioners in roles, his hasty method
of filming the X-Wing attacks on the Death Star, and in the case of the guys
who played Biggs Darklighter and Fixer, their reactions to discovering most of
their work had been cut from the film.
To a lesser extent, fans will be interested in the sequence
on fan conventions. Bulloch fretting over leaking ink on some fan’s Boba Fett poster
isn’t exactly high drama, but it gets fairly juicy when actors start dishing on
who does and doesn’t deserve to be selling their autographs at these
conventions and Prowse explains how he feels his contribution to the films have
been minimized and how such comments have gotten him barred from conventions.
As a story of the thankless job of being a film extra, Elstree 1976 basically gets the job done
as the actors discuss the struggles and successes of their work (there’s a
great clip of Prowse in a road-safety PSA with an R2-D2 type robot), bouncing
around in different vocations and avocations between acting gigs, and
personal lives sometimes tainted by depression and bitterness (Greedo seems really happy,though), though Spira could have made the telling a lot more dynamic by
not relying so heavily on talking-head shots. As a Star Wars story, Elstree 1976
is fulfilling in fits and starts, and may make fans wish the new DVD had at
least contained some bonus footage with more behind-the-scenes anecdotes.
