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Steve Sansweet owns "The world's largest private collection of 'Star Wars' memorabilia, outside of George, of course," he says, referring to the films' impressario

May 15, 2005
The Force Is With the Fans (One Superfan, in Particular)
By MICHAEL JOSEPH GROSS

HE'S almost a god - he's the closest thing there is to George Lucas," one "Star Wars" fan exclaimed, pointing at Steve Sansweet, a short, bearded 59-year-old who looks like the love child of Buddha and George Carlin and who, as Lucasfilm's head of fan relations, is a bona fide celebrity among devotees of the Skywalker saga.

After greeting these, his own fans, Mr. Sansweet took the stage at last year's Comic-Con, among the largest comic book conventions. A crowd of 4,000 (including hundreds in costume) were gathered in a gigantic room at the San Diego Convention Center for a three-hour multimedia pageant of "Star Wars" nostalgia (even Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill showed up) and promotional videos announcing Lucasfilm's major forthcoming DVD's, video games, television shows and other products. The climax was the announcement, "for the first time anywhere on Earth," of the title of the latest "Star Wars" film. When Mr. Sansweet strode out to dispense that manna- "Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" - to the assembled hordes, they hailed him as if he were a rock star.

Last month in Indianapolis, at a "Star Wars" convention known as Celebration III, the lead-in to the premiere of the long-awaited final installment opening Thursday, he said, he "signed 1,000 autographs and posed for 2,000 pictures." As curious as his celebrity status may be, the course that led him to this lofty peak is even curiouser.

His arrival at Lucasfilm in 1996 marked the end of a distinguished 26-year career as a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, where he wrote a prizewinning series of exposés of multinational bribery and served as Los Angeles bureau chief for nine years. In a recent interview at Lucasfilm's Big Rock Ranch in San Rafael, Calif., Mr. Sansweet said he thought his two careers had much in common: "In a way I still am a journalist. I edit the 'Star Wars' magazines for Spain, Mexico, France, Germany, the U.S. and the U.K."

This may seem a stretch. But Lucasfilm's decision to make fan relations an in-house service (Mr. Sansweet's primary title is director of content management, in the company's marketing division) exemplifies a larger trend in the entertainment industry. Traditional journalism is losing ground as the primary distribution channel for information about stars, films and television shows. Entertainers, studios and production companies are dispensing that information directly to fans in unconventional ways, allowing greater corporate control over the public image of entertainment properties, and creating significant new revenue streams, as well.

Mr. Sansweet, who says he owns "the world's largest private collection of 'Star Wars' memorabilia, outside of George, of course" (a claim called indisputable by Lisa Stevens, former president of the "Star Wars" Fan Club) began his collection in 1978 when Kenner Products released four action figures that would spawn a $9 billion marketing windfall. As his star (and salary) rose at The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Sansweet's passion for all things "Star Wars" intensified. He added two floors to his cantilevered house in the Hollywood Hills and hired an archivist to organize the collection, which numbers some 100,000 pieces. Then he took out a second mortgage to buy some vehicle props from the films. (Today his treasures are housed in a 5,000-square-foot barn next to his home in Northern California. Mr. Sansweet declined to estimate the collection's value but did not contradict a guess of several million dollars.)

After Mr. Lucas announced in 1994 that he would make three prequels to the first "Star Wars" trilogy, Mr. Sansweet said, "from time to time as I was falling asleep I would think, Wow, that sure would be interesting to work inside Lucasfilm while he's making the next three movies. Part of that was my curiosity as a reporter. Part of that was my fannishness." When he heard that the company was starting a publishing division, he called and said, "If anybody does a 'Star Wars' book it should be me." (He had already written two books: "The Punishment Cure," on aversion therapies, and a collectibles book, "Science Fiction Toys and Models.")

Still at The Wall Street Journal, he wrote "Star Wars: From Concept to Screen to Collectible" (1992), which traced the film "from an idea in George's head to how they did the merchandise." He has since written 10 more "Star Wars" books, including an exhaustive collectibles encyclopedia. (Some of the books have earned him royalties on sales; others were written for flat fees with no royalties. Two forthcoming books, "Star Wars Poster Book" and "Star Wars Chronicles: The Prequels" were written on his own time, not as part of his duties at Lucasfilm.)

In the mid-1990's he began appearing on QVC home-shopping programs to promote the books. Mr. Sansweet remembered that the host of his first show there introduced him as an editor at The Wall Street Journal and that it did not please his bosses. How could he be a serious journalist and a stark raving fan at the same time?

His boss at the time, the managing editor Paul Steiger, does not recall any conflict over Mr. Sansweet's outside passions. "I just thought it was a kick," Mr. Steiger said. "He was a fanatic about the topic but he was a great journalist."

In time, the allure of the X-wing fighter prevailed. When Lucasfilm asked Mr. Sansweet if he knew anyone willing to attend fan conventions to promote the trilogy's 1997 theatrical re-release, he asked for the job himself. He said that he took a 65 percent pay cut and that he attended 60 conventions that first year. The position became permanent, and he moved to work at Skywalker Ranch, in 1998.

Mr. Steiger was not surprised by Mr. Sansweet's move: "I totally understand this. If Paul DePodesta wanted to give me his job as general manager of the Dodgers, I'd take it in a minute. I was delighted for Steve and saw nothing bizarre in it."

Jim Ward, president of LucasArts and vice president of marketing, distribution and online for Lucasfilm, said he hired Mr. Sansweet because "getting the message out to the influential fans who can then disseminate that information to the whole fan base is not as easy as you might think. He has relationships that can create a groundswell among our fans on a mass basis to go out and celebrate 'Star Wars.' "

Not everyone at Lucasfilm, however, immediately cottoned to having a fan on staff. Haltingly Mr. Sansweet explained, "There have been cases in the past, not very many, where people who seemed to be really passionate fans but also have something a little screwed up sort of get through the interviewing process and are here and something goes really wrong."

But Mr. Sansweet gained his colleagues' respect and takes pains not to exploit his situation. He buys merchandise at StarWarsShop.com with the standard Lucasfilm employee discount of 10 percent. But, he added, "I'm out there at Midnight Madness at Toys 'R' Us and 48 Hours of the Force at Wal-Mart just like everybody else. People say, 'What are you doing here?' I say, 'The same thing you're doing here! Buying toys!' "

Over the years his duties have grown. In addition to serving as a liaison for fans and as an ambassador to their conventions, he writes photo captions for the publicity department and helps coordinate the rollout of images and information. Two years ago he overhauled the "Star Wars" Fan Club, when Lucasfilm withdrew the license of the fan who had been club president since 1986.

"He's a jack of all trades at the company," Mr. Ward said. "He's a representative of every aspect of how our fans engage in our brand, and that's what's fantastic about him."

Mr. Sansweet's expertise as a collector, too, is a resource for Lucasfilm's business affairs and legal department in routing counterfeit merchandise. (Lucasfilm declined to make representatives of those departments available for this article.)

His insights about "Star Wars" merchandise go deeper than his talent for authentication. To the commonplace that "Star Wars" merchandising changed the feature film business, Mr. Sansweet offered a more nuanced observation: it also changed how information about entertainment is circulated. "The way 'Star Wars' became part of the popular culture is the merchandising," he said. "Kids taking home the figures and the ships and wearing their Underoos. 'Star Wars' became ingrained because of the play patterns as well as the gossip around the playground about the film."

Although some earlier pop icons, like Dick Tracy and Captain Video, also spawned successful merchandising industries, none had the international reach or sustained market power of "Star Wars." And franchises like "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" and "Spider-Man" have tried to replicate the "Star Wars" formula, but none as successfully.

The circulation of information about "Star Wars" movies became inseparable from the acquisition and manipulation of toys based on the films, and that changed the nature of fandom. Children were inspired or enticed to create a new kind of play, using replicas of "Star Wars" characters to reenact a film's stories and create new ones.

"Star Wars" merchandise also imputed fandom with business savvy. When Mr. Sansweet was a child, he assembled science-fiction model kits, which his mother threw out when he grew older "because they were dust collectors." Today, he said, "kids know better" than to let such things happen.

For his column about collectibles in the "Star Wars" Fan Club magazine, he said, "I get letters that say, 'I just bought a' - fill in the blank - 'for $7 at a flea market. How much is it worth?' And it's scrawled in block letters, and you know it's from some kid 6 years old."

As a fan, however, Mr. Sansweet finds no cause for cynicism in a generation of 6-year-olds who look at their toy chests and see dollar signs. He contends this is simply a new stage in the entertainment industry's orchestration of commerce, art and enthusiasm.

In sustaining the Lucasfilm franchise, he said, "certainly there's a bottom line involved but there's even a broader strategy that can result in making money. How do we keep the fans happy? What does it take? Does it take more product? Less product? Should we go quiet for a number of years like we did after 'Return of the Jedi'? Do we have something that we can come up with fairly quickly? How quickly? What do we do in the interim? All those things are part of the mix. And the fan base is one of the strategic considerations that go into the overall strategy of the 'Star Wars' brand."

At the Celebration III fan convention in Indianapolis, Mr. Sansweet recalled, "George himself said several times, 'Without you guys, there wouldn't be 'Star Wars.' You're the reason I was able to come back and make the new movies, and complete my story. We have all of this to thank you for.' And it's true. People here really believe that. And I've had a teensy bit to do with that sort of thing, it makes me very proud and happy."

Despite such satisfactions, being a demigod takes its toll. During the build-up to the premiere of "Episode III," Mr. Sansweet has subsisted on as little as 12 hours' sleep in a week. He sometimes eats only potato chips for dinner, and he suffers daily migraine headaches. He said: "My doctor says I need to go cold turkey off the medication, but right now I can't give up anything. He said, 'When can you do it?' I said, 'I think January 2006.' "

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