During a Dec. 10 visit to the line outside the TCL Chinese Theatre, THR saw lightsabers, a (human) infant dressed as Baby Yoda and a man who styled himself after George Lucas. Gasking’s CountingDown is dead, having only survived for that Phantom Menace line. In its place is LiningUp.net, a group that rose from CountingDown‘s ashes for 2002’s Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones.
As any veteran of the line will tell you, camping out for Star Wars is far more comfortable now than in the past. The Chinese Theatre allows the group to sleep in the courtyard, which is adorned by the handprints of Hollywood royalty. The theater provides a security guard and even allows the fans to have access to the theater to use the restroom.
A common question from tourists passing by continues to be, “Do you people have jobs?” The answer is yes. You don’t have to be there 24 hours a day; fans check in and out via electronic wristbands that log their time. Time spent in line is a badge of honor, and those who log the most get the first pick of seats (and bragging rights). Any member worth their salt can tell you exactly what number they were in the last line. People proudly wear badges from previous lines around their necks, with the ’99ers — as people who camped out for Phantom Menace are called — usually having the most. The fans also have colors on their badges to denote their spoiler tolerance. Red? That means they haven’t even seen the trailer. Blue: They’ll watch the trailer or any promotional materials released by Disney but nothing more. Green: Fire up those Reddit spoiler posts.
“When Phantom Menace came out, I spoiled myself crazy about it. As a result, I felt like the movie had already happened,” says Stephanie Olmeda-Vance as she shows THR her red badge. “I’m never going to do that again. I just want to be surprised.”
Since 2015’s The Force Awakens, LiningUp.net has raised $25,000 for the Starlight Children’s Foundation, via sponsorships, as well as the markup the group puts on tickets it purchases and then sells to its line members.
The group is older and wiser now. But like a Force Ghost of Yoda, stories from those wilder times in line linger. There are legends that are hard to verify. Multiple people recall that one year, a mysterious young man huddled up with the line for a few days and later ended up on the news. He had been arrested on suspicion of murder and, as the story goes, he had been hiding out in the line (THR could not track down a record of who this apparent suspect was.)
Other tales bubble up if you hang around long enough.
Let’s travel back to April 7, 1999 — that first night. Back then, it was just American college student Genovese, the Australian entrepreneur-in-the-making Gasking and few people holding down the fort during a night that dipped to around 50 degrees, chilly for Los Angeles. It didn’t take long for them to learn the ins and outs of surviving on Hollywood Boulevard — namely, the Roosevelt Hotel across the street, which had the best bathroom available.
“The next morning we had reinforcements come in,” recalls Genovese of that night. “I could finally go home and know there were going to be people there 24 hours a day. But I just wanted to go back.”
Across town in Westwood, 17-year-old Alter and his competing ragtag group was slowly attracting more and more followers. They weren’t associated with CountingDown, but they generated almost as much attention. Alter, now a producer who co-founded the genre news website Heroic Hollywood, was semi-regularly quoted in the newspaper. People brought generators to power TVs and DVD players that would play Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas.
“We had Jeremy’s Deli around the corner. If it’s cold, somebody could go get a cup of cocoa,” says Alter, who usually took the day shift since many of the folks could only come at night. “Early in the morning I’d get there. … There’d be more people to put in shift hours at night: their sleeping bags, their lawn chairs.”
Though Alter’s group had the bragging rights to being the first to camp out, CountingDown‘s leadership was innovative and ambitious. They were aware they had something potentially valuable on their hands and that an acquisition could be in the cards. (They were right; after the line, DreamWorks purchased the site and used it as its internal marketing arm for several years.)
With the Star Wars line, Gasking and his team accomplished big things, like live-streaming images from the line 24/7 via a web cam from a suite across the street at the Roosevelt Hotel. The site also put out a call for Star Wars fan films and received a cache of content kids had shot in the late 1970s on 16mm that featured wonderfully cheesy homemade costumes and props.
“We streamed all day, every day, Star Wars-themed shows interspersed with these fan films, which were just classics and hilarious,” says Gasking. “That was the origin of what is now [things like] YouTube and Netflix. “
These sorts of attention-getting moves — and particularly, rumblings that CountingDown was angling for a corporate acquisition — didn’t sit well with everyone in the line. So there was a civil war. A handful of people left to form their own rival line across the street from the Chinese for a few days.
“I totally hear where they are coming from, but they ended up jumping ship across the street for a couple of days, and everyone got back in line again,” says Gasking.
As the media attention intensified, CountingDown members would get phone calls from around the world at the pay phone near the front of the line.
“We picked up the phone, and all you hear is these guys, ‘Hey, we’re calling from Scotland! We are flipping drunk, but we wanted to tell you that you guys are freaking awesome,'” recalls Sameer Bakhda. “We were getting calls from Japan, China. Europe. People who couldn’t believe we were standing in line for Star Wars.”
During this time, the Chinese Theatre saw the group as an oddity but a harmless one. After all, the line members weren’t on theater property, and the group was bringing publicity as well as visits from actors such as young Anakin Skywalker actor Jake Lloyd and Ray Park, who brought his character Darth Maul’s double lightsaber to the line.
Ultimately, the theater helped set up guard rails a few weeks before the movie opened to facilitate the group getting tickets when they went on sale — a tacit acknowledgement of their sacrifices.
The irony of all this work was the movie itself. The Phantom Menace was one of the most anticipated movies of all time, and ultimately a letdown to many.
“A lot of people were disappointed with how it turned out, but I didn’t care if the movie was bad or not,” says Genovese. “The movie was kind of icing on the cake.”
“The incredible moment I’ll always remember is the actual screening,” says Gasking. “The start of the screening and the anticipation of that. Where there are beach balls running over the Chinese Theatre and people screaming. You couldn’t hear any of the first dialogue for the first five minutes. It was like the Super Bowl of films. It’s just unrepeatable.”
Only, it would be repeatable. Seven more times over the next 20 years.
When Gasking and his cohorts sold CountingDown to DreamWorks after the success of the line, a few of the line members, including Genovese, decided they wanted to keep the fun going. And LiningUp.net was born. The “Latest News!” section of LiningUp.net described the group as “one not affiliated with a corporation like the first one was.”
Yet a corporation did come aboard the project, as a sponsor for charity. Netflix, then just a humble mail-order DVD company, donated $10,000 to the Starlight Children’s Foundation in exchange for the line displaying a Netflix banner.
Once again, the line was six weeks long, and the media attention was just as intense. Access Hollywood arranged for George Lucas to call into the famous pay phone, where the line member with the most hours was allowed to ask one question: What was it like to be the father of a generation? Lucas’ answer wasn’t even important, and if you ask line members today, they don’t really know. The fact that the line had been blessed by the great one was what mattered.
That second line featured some star power from another franchise. Lord of the Rings stars Elijah Wood and Sean Astin happened to be in the crowd at the Chinese Theatre as the LiningUp group walked in.
“They are in line behind us. I said to them, ‘You guys are stars. Why are you not going to the premiere?'” recalls Bakhda. “They said,’ We want to see the movie with the fans because this is the experience that we want.'”
“This is the huge dilemma as line organizers,” says Genovese. “We quickly came to the decision, this is where we’ve always done our lines, this is where we are going to stay. We’re going to stay here at the Chinese Theatre anyway.”
Steve Sansweet, then head of fan relations at Lucasfilm, helped arrange for the crew to purchase tickets at Arclight, even though they weren’t waiting in line there. On opening day, the line was escorted down to the Arclight in style with the 501st Legion, a famous group of fans who dress as Stormtroopers.
“Everybody saw the movie there, the first showing, and everybody was happy with the help of Lucasfilm,” says Genovese.
Then it was time to say goodbye. The prequel saga was over.
Life went on. Some people from the line kept in touch. Some didn’t. Then, on On Oct. 30, 2012, a shock: George Lucas was selling Lucasfilm to Disney, which would be making a new trilogy launching in 2015.
When Star Wars: The Force Awakens came 10 years after Revenge of the Sith, the group decided to forgo six weeks in favor of 12 days. Things were cushier now. The media treated them kinder and so did the Chinese Theatre, which now allowed them to camp out in the courtyard.
The Wild West days may be done, but there were new special memories to be made. The Force Awakens line saw the TCL Chinese Theatre’s first wedding ceremony, with Caroline Ritter and Andrew Porters marrying in the courtyard. True to LiningUp form, the larger-than-life personalities made it memorable for the bride and groom. Line member Jason “Grimlock” Thomas yelled, “It’s a trap!” as Ritter walked out.
By 2018, Darth Maul actor Park had been coming to hang with the group for nearly two decades. But none knew he’d be making a cameo appearance in Solo: A Star Wars Story.
“Ray was sitting right in front of me. When that scene came on in Solo where they show Darth Maul, the whole theater went nuts. We all went crazy, and I grabbed Ray by the shoulders and was shaking him,” says Genovese. “He was loving it, to reveal that moment he couldn’t tell us about.”
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In spring 2002, when Jett Lucas was 9 years old, he and his family happened to be driving by the Chinese Theatre. He peered out the window at the dozens of people lining up for his father’s movie, Attack of the Clones.
What in the world does his father, George Lucas, think of these people who have dedicated their lives to worshiping his work?
“We’ve never actually spoken in depth about his opinion of my fandom. I think he enjoys it as much as I do,” says Jett, a friend of the LiningUp and now a production VFX assistant on The Mandalorian. “I’ve spent countless late nights at home watching Star Wars till late into the evening, and he’ll pop up, probably to tell me to go to bed, only to end up sitting down and watching through to the end.”
