Kent resident Craig Foreman does not have to worry about getting a ticket to Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Thursday. Neither do dozens of his friends.
Foreman, director and co-founder of the Expedition Academy, booked an entire screen — 87 seats in all — for a Force Awakens showing in the Cuyahoga Falls Cinemark at 7 p.m. Thursday. The movie, the seventh live-action film in the series, officially opens Friday, but Thursday showings are also abundant.
“I’m a superfan, and I was all nervous, what if I don’t get a seat?” Foreman said recently. “So I’ve been talking to Cinemark, national Cinemark, for over a year, trying to book a screening. And finally there was a time when they said, we can do it.”
While it cost about $1,300 to book the theater for a showing of the 3-D version of Force Awakens, Foreman said that it won’t just be his wife and kids in the hall with him. The cost was covered quickly since many of his moviegoing companions will be from the Ohio Star Wars Collectors Club, a 200-member group divided into three regions.
“I knew that there were plenty of guys like me,” Foreman said.
At the Cuyahoga Falls showing, the group will have “custom T-shirts, buttons and magnets commemorating the event,” said club President Dave Brown of Macedonia. “Some members will show up in costume, and others will be working club tables to help advertise our group.”
Fan devotion
The love for the Star Wars films is more than slightly intense; Foreman has tickets for several other opening-weekend showings besides the group screening and has been wearing a different Star Wars T-shirt to his school every day since Dec. 1.
He also has a tattoo on his left shoulder that includes a Rebel Alliance logo and six lightsabers, one for each of the movies to date. He expects to be adding a seventh soon.
Fans know that they are sometimes subject to mockery. Saturday Night Live on Dec. 12 did a sketch in which new Force Awakens toys were being snapped up not only by children, but by obsessive adults unwilling to even take the toys out of their boxes.
“The SNL sketch was hilarious, and it definitely nailed some of the stereotypes of adult collectors,” said Brown. “But, people might be surprised at how normal we are. Several of us have display cases just like the one at the end of the sketch, sure, but we also have girlfriends, wives and families, too.
“We have teachers, engineers, college administrators, truck drivers, managers, housewives and members from many other career paths,” added Brown, who works in university housing at Case Western.
Lifetime passion
Still, there’s this love affair with Star Wars that can span a lifetime. Foreman, 39, started his when he was very young.
“When the first one came out, I was 1 years old,” he said. “It came back out in 1979 as a re-release, and my parents took me to that.”
Acknowledging that he has seen the movie “a million times since,” Foreman still said that the first showing was memorable.
“I do remember C-3PO and R2-D2 in that very first scene. That sticks for some reason, then the Stormtroopers and Darth Vader coming in. I remember that vividly as a little kid, sitting there seeing it. That’s all I remember … but I do remember seeing that.”
Beloved memorabilia
As for the collecting, “When I was 2 … my parents started getting me the toys. I’m one of those insane, huge collectors, and my parents helped me with that when I was a kid and we kept everything. My parents’ basement in Centerville, a very good-size basement, is now lined with the collection. There’s shelving built in, really beautiful display that my parents take care of for me.”
He has some items in Kent, since he is still acquiring memorabilia. But most of it — hundreds of toys along with “tons” of posters, autographs, books and shirts — ends up going to Centerville when Foreman visits his parents.
“In a way, I hate it at times because I want to be around [the collection],” Foreman said. “Other times, it’s a cool mission to go see it with my kids” — 11-, 9- and 7-year-old sons, who have seen all the movies and will be at the screening along with Foreman and his wife.
“I’m a sociology teacher. Obviously the toys were very much a part of my childhood, so there’s that connection to my childhood. There’s obviously the family relationships in the movie, the romance in the movie, but there’s also father-son stuff going on. Not just the Luke-Darth Vader thing. That’s obviously there. But Han Solo was my favorite as a kid. With the new movie coming out, Han Solo — the actor [Harrison Ford] — is right around the same age as my father.”
So when he sees the older Han in the movie trailers, there’s a connection not only to the character but to Foreman’s father and childhood. He also remembers his mother taking him both to the movies and in search of Star Wars toys, adding to his emotional ties to Star Wars.
That said, even among fans controversy rages over changes Star Wars creator George Lucas has made to the films, re-editing and in one notorious case changing a key scene.
Foreman is reluctant to bash Lucas. Even as he notes what the filmmaker did, he said, “He brought this thing that I’m so in love with.”
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal, Ohio.com. Facebook, Twitter and the HeldenFiles Online blog. You can contact him at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.