Star Wars was the last thing on Albin Johnson’s mind the grey, wet summer day in 1994 when he skidded into the back of a van in Columbia, South Carolina. The other guy didn’t seem to have any damage, but Johnson got out to check anyway. His hood had popped up, and his grille had broken. Let’s call it even, said the van driver. Johnson, relieved, stepped between the cars to put his hood down. That’s when a third vehicle suddenly appeared, hydroplaned into the back of Johnson’s car, and all but sliced him in two.
His surgeon told Johnson he had lost nearly all of the tendons in his left leg and was facing amputation; his exact words, according to Johnson, were “we’re going to throw your leg in a meat bucket.” Johnson fired him. He underwent twenty operations on the leg and then spent a year in a wheelchair while getting muscles removed, skin grafted on, and bones from elsewhere in his body chipped up and injected into the injury. At one point he nearly bled to death on the operating table.
A year later, left with what he called a “Frankenstein foot,” Johnson finally elected for amputation and prosthesis. Dark days followed, and even his then-wife Beverly giving birth to their first daughter couldn’t quite pull him out of the funk. “I kind of hid in my house and felt like a freak,” Johnson says.
Johnson kept his workaday job at Circuit City—“putting my psychology degree to good use,” he says—and it was there in late 1996 that a coworker, Tom Crews (yes, his real name), made a mission of cheering Johnson up. They talked about common interests: karate, rock and roll. Then they talked about Star Wars. Hey, did Johnson know the movies were coming back to theaters, in so-called Special Editions? Johnson brightened. “All we talked about that day was that opening scene where the Stormtroopers come tearing through the door of the Tantive IV. We couldn’t let go of that concept.”
Memories came flooding back. Star Wars memories.
Johnson had been born in poverty in the Ozarks in 1969. In the 1970s, his parents were called to a Pentecostal ministry in the Carolinas. His Sunday school teacher told him George Lucas had signed a deal with the devil and made his actors sign papers saying they were going to worship the Force. But Johnson went to see the first film twenty times anyway. Every time he came out of the theater he would run along its brick wall, imagining the gaps between the bricks to be the Death Star trench, and himself the pilot in the X-wing. He would run it so fast, and so close into the trench, he would occasionally skid his head painfully against the bricks. No matter—it was worth it to be Luke Skywalker.
Johnson laments that he didn’t grow up to look anything like Luke, and then laughs: “Hey, at least we’re both amputees.” But then there are the space soldiers, the Stormtroopers pouring through the door in all that bright molded plastic. As he and Crews reminisced about Star Wars’ most numerous icons, they realized that so long as the detailing on the suit was right, anybody could embody them. When you’re a Stormtrooper, nobody knows you’re an amputee. You’re supposed to blend in, to be expendable—perfect for a shy, self-conscious guy.
Johnson became obsessed with the costume as “a passport to the Star Wars universe.” He started sketching out ideas for how he could build his own, while Crews searched the nascent web, betting that he could find an authentic Stormtrooper costume—that is, one that matched the on-screen version in every detail, whether Lucasfilm-licensed or not—in time for the Special Editions. This was the pre-Google age, but somehow he stumbled on a Usenet posting in which a guy claimed to be selling an original movie prop costume in an “estate sale” for $2,000. The vendor was actually trying to avoid getting sued by Lucasfilm for selling a reproduction suit without its say-so, without Lucas getting a cut. This was risky, and reproductions in those days were rare. “It was like uncovering a 747 jet in caveman times,” Johnson recalls.
Johnson cajoled Beverly, the real breadwinner of the family, into buying the suit in exchange for the next ten years’ worth of Christmas presents. Soon, awkward plastic molding parts arrived in the mail. He nervously constructed them with Dremel and glue gun. It was horrible: the helmet hung loosely; the suit was constricting. He felt ridiculous: a plastic spaceman with a metal leg. He had no line of sight in that helmet. No wonder Stormtroopers were such poor marksmen.
Still, Johnson wore it to his local one-screen theater for showings of The Empire Strikes Back Special Edition. Theatergoers poked him and laughed. “I had one guy after another saying, ‘You loser, don’t you wish you could get laid?,’” Johnson recalls.
But then Crews found his own costume online—another pricey, hard-to-construct model—and joined Johnson a few weeks later for the Return of the Jedi screening. This time, patrons looked awestruck and a little afraid as the pair confidently patrolled the lobby. “That’s when the switch really flipped,” Johnson says. “The more Stormtroopers, the better it looks. I resolved that somehow, in my lifetime, I would get as many as ten Stormtroopers together in one place. That’s how big I was thinking.”
The pair built a website and posted pictures of their exploits—at comic shops, State Fairs, and preschool graduation, whatever gigs they could get. Johnson wrote captions about a couple of Troopers who were always falling afoul of Darth Vader. He gave his trooper the name TK-210,* a denizen of detention block 2551 on the Death Star. Within weeks, four more Stormtroopers emailed him with pictures of their own. This was before Facebook, before flash mobs, before the golden age of geekdom dawned in the twenty-first century. The Internet had barely become a gathering place for Star Wars fans, let alone Stormtrooper costume owners. Yet somehow, here they were.
Johnson now pictured a whole Stormtrooper legion. He recalled several times back in grade school where he’d tried to organize some kind of juvenile army out of his friends; after Star Wars came out, he dubbed one attempt the Order of the Space Knights. Clearly, that name wouldn’t work for Stormtroopers. He tried to think of names that recalled his dad’s World War II fighter pilot squadron—“something zippy, something cool”—added some alliteration, and came up with the Fightin’ 501st. He wrote a backstory that solved a question he’d formed watching the movies: How come Darth Vader always seems to have a detachment of Stormtroopers at his elbow whenever he needs them? The 501st, he decided, was a shadow legion, off the books, always ready: Vader’s Fist.
It was, friends agreed, a pretty neat idea. They helped him hand out leaf-lets at conventions: “Are you loyal? Hardworking? Fully expendable? Join the Imperial 501st!” In 2002, Johnson mustered roughly 150 Stormtrooper costumers in Indianapolis at Celebration II, the second official Star Wars convention, and offered their services to a skeptical Lucasfilm to let the 501st help out as crowd-control when the event’s security proved woefully inadequate for the thirty thousand attendees. Lucasfilm was won over by the tireless, hyper-organized troopers, and started to use the 501st as volunteers for all its events. Lucasfilm licensees followed suit. If you’ve ever been to one of the Star Wars Days held at dozens of baseball stadiums across the United States, if you’ve seen multiple Stormtroopers, or Darth Vader or Boba Fett at a store, a movie theater, or a mall, you’ve almost certainly been staring at the forces of the 501st.
Johnson’s idea didn’t stop at America’s shores, either. The 501st Legion is now recognized as one of the largest costuming organizations in the world.* It has active members in forty-seven countries on five continents, divided into sixty-seven local garrisons and twenty-nine outposts (those units that comprise fewer than twenty-five members). More than 20 percent of the troops are female. The 501st absorbed a once-independent UK garrison and established a garrison near Paris, though some French Stormtroopers have gone their own way with the 59eme legion. The Germans, meanwhile, have a garrison consisting of five squads that are all large enough to be garrisons on their own—but are loath to undergo any kind of de-unification.
The 501st elects local and legion-wide commanding officers every year. To Johnson’s dismay, COs are imposing ever-more stringent membership requirements—your Stormtrooper belt must contain six pouches, not four—meaning that even the “authentic” (but not technically screen-accurate) Lucasfilm-licensed suits sold online won’t get you in the club. Most members make their own, hammering away at styrene sheets on vacuforming tables, sinking thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours into a single costume.
Such stringency notwithstanding, the 501st Legion is starting to stretch the limits of its name. Roman legions, world history’s largest, rarely had more than 5,000 members; Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with 3,500. The 501st, at the time of this writing, numbers 6,583 screen-accurate active members. That, if you’re keeping score, is 6,573 more troops than Johnson first anticipated.
More importantly, Johnson and Crews’s creation has reached that galaxy far, far away. In 2004 came the first official Star Wars novel to feature the 501st, written by famed franchise author Timothy Zahn—who happened to have first encountered Johnson and his crew at a convention, kicking back with a cooler full of beers after a long day. Johnson held onto sobriety long enough to explain the concept of the 501st. Zahn nodded thoughtfully, went away, and promptly wrote the novel Survivor’s Quest, in which a squad from the 501st costarred with Luke Skywalker.
Even greater honors were to follow. The next year, George Lucas officially included the legion in his final Star Wars movie, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. A detachment of Clone Troopers, the predecessors of Stormtroopers, follow the newly minted Darth Vader into the Jedi Temple as he prepares to massacre its inhabitants. In the script, they are designated the 501st Legion. But Johnson had no inkling of this until a member of his Tokyo Garrison mailed him a Star Wars action figure. Amid the Japanese script on the box was a number: 501. Hasbro has since churned out an impressive five million of these plastic 501st members. Ill-informed fans started to claim that Johnson was copying Lucas’s name, rather than the other way around.*
The matter was settled in 2007, when George Lucas was made grand marshall of the Tournament of Roses Parade (associated with the Rose Bowl) in Pasadena. Lucas asked for the 501st by name and paid to fly hundreds of its troops from around the world to march five and a half miles with his float. Here they were, finally assembled, the space soldiers, going through actual army drills with actual drill sergeants. Lucas addressed them the night before the parade: “The big invasion is in a few days,” he said, deadpan. “I don’t expect all of you to make it back. But that’s okay, because Stormtroopers are expendable.” The legion roared its approval.
After a breather following the punishing march, the troopers put their buckets—as they call their helmets—back on and posed for photos with Lucas. Lucasfilm’s Steve Sansweet insisted on introducing Lucas and Johnson, two shy men who prefer to run things from behind the scenes. “Good work on all of this,” said Lucas.
“This is all you!” was all Johnson managed to sputter before the Creator.
“No,” said Lucas. “I made Star Wars.” He gestured at the rows of white-armored troopers, standing stiffly at attention and carrying the flags of their garrisons. “You made this. I’m very proud of it.”
It was enough to make a guy’s head so big it would never again fit in a bucket. But even after that unparalleled moment of validation, Johnson retains a sense of perspective. “Y’all, if we’re not having fun, this is just a drag,” he tells his COs. “We’re plastic spacemen. If anybody in the club is getting too serious, we’ll throw out that tagline. ‘Yep, we’re plastic spacemen.’”
Every army needs someone to march behind, and the 501st is no exception. If the outfit is called Vader’s Fist, then naturally every garrison needs more than screen-accurate Stormtroopers. It needs to walk in anonymous lockstep behind the most famous and frightening space soldier of them all.
Mark Fordham was a sniper on a SWAT team in Tennessee when he constructed a crude Darth Vader costume for his police department’s 1994 Halloween party. The other officers raved about it, and that got Fordham thinking: How would people react to a screen-accurate Vader?
He called the main number at Lucasfilm and somehow found himself connected to a kindly soul who told him the pieces he needed: quilted leather jump-suit with a blanket sewn in, wool crepe cape. “Vader is fairly comfortable,” says Fordham. “He’s just very hot.”
Fordham paid local fashion students $200 to stitch the costume together. Now he had a new plan: visit the local schools dressed as Vader and offer a moral message: “Don’t choose the quick and easy path like I did.” But when he called Lucasfilm back to get their sign-off on his plan, the person he was randomly connected to this time around freaked out. Vader is our copyright, they said; we hire actors to portray him. You can’t. “That kind of burst my bubble,” said Fordham.
Still, the SWAT sniper figured there was nothing wrong in wearing the costume to the premieres of Episode I in 1999 and Episode II in 2002. He got the same result as Johnson: trooping alone is no fun. So he found some local 501st members and discovered to his surprise that the Stormtroopers enthusiastically welcomed a Vader. (Johnson would later drop “Stormtrooper” from the Legion’s name to make this clearer.) Fordham practiced his James Earl Jones intonation listening to Star Wars tapes on his commute. He jury-rigged a mic and amp into his mask to approximate the mechanical sound of the helmeted arch-villain. The amp used up two nine-volt batteries every thirty minutes—but for Fordham, there was nothing worse than being a voiceless Vader.
In short order, Fordham was elected garrison commanding officer and then CO for the entire global legion. He introduced awards and a rank system, promoting members who trooped more. When the 501st started to do more charity work, he felt it needed a common protocol, so he drafted a new charter to amend Johnson’s “codex fundator”; the legion’s goal, Fordham argued, needed to be more than “have fun.” The 501st should be unified and identifiable, and the best way to achieve this would be through a franchise operation. “If you go to McDonald’s in Chicago or Perth, you want to recognize you’re in McDonald’s,” he says. “We wanted that common identity. When you invite us to something, you don’t have to ask, ‘Well, which 501st?’”
Fordham’s philosophy about the 501st is, in many ways, the opposite of Johnson’s. He likes the legion to be exact, standardized, and meritocratic. There are up to five Vaders in every garrison, and naturally no event should have more than one Vader. Currently, the legion offers them trooping opportunities in order of seniority. Fordham would prefer an annual audition in front of members to choose each year’s Vader. “If that’s me, great. If not, I would want the best Vader doing an event.”
Fordham and his wife, Crickette, a Stormtrooper, had moved from Tennessee to Utah in the late 1990s. That was a full ten-hour drive away from Lucasfilm, but Fordham frequently drove to Skywalker Ranch and back on his own dime, “to show we take the brand seriously.” It was on one of those visits that he was first told about Lucas and the Tournament of Roses Parade. While Albin Johnson marched in blissful Stormtrooper anonymity, Fordham was the Vader at the front of the pack, George Lucas’s loyal enforcer.
During the coverage of the parade, one celebrity announcer joked that the troopers “needed to get jobs” and must be “marching home to their parents’ basement.” That kind of comment rankled: the troops were PhDs, doctors, technicians, aircraft mechanics, as well as many military and police personnel like Fordham. (“We’re kind of drawn to the uniform element,” he says.) The announcer was displaying exactly the perception of the legion that Fordham was fighting to change with his professional charter.
The conflict between Johnson’s y’all-have-fun ethos and Fordham’s style of strict screen accuracy and professionalism runs right through the legion. I’ve heard about intra-garrison conflicts over height restrictions (Mark says he would prefer to be a Stormtrooper but is too tall; Crickette would like to be Vader but is too short). One Asian member of the legion wanted to portray Anakin Skywalker before his transformation into Vader; that touched off a huge internal debate about whether he should have to wear makeup to look more Caucasian. There are even disputes over the proper level of interaction with the rival good guys’ outfit, the Rebel Legion; I met a couple of 501st COs who also command their local Rebel outposts. The Rebels are about a third of the size of the Imperials and seem to prefer being outnumbered. “It kind of reflects the films,” says Suzy Stelling, the CO of the hundred-strong UK Rebel Legion base. “The rebels are small, but we get through in the end.”
The ultimate irony of the 501st is that for such a fascist-looking organization, it is actually profoundly democratic. There are local and global elections to the legion council every February, and they’re not sham elections. There’s a lot of healthy, rambunctious debate in the ranks. But ultimately they’re all brothers and sisters under the Lycra; they’ve all literally bled for their uniforms at one time or another. The “armor bite,” as the plastic panels’ skin-pinching is known, is felt by everyone. (Everyone except the comfortably hot Vaders, that is.)
How do you get into the legion? By submitting multiple photos of your costume to a compliance officer, who will check the tiniest of details for screen accuracy; the six-pouch criterion is one of many. Would-be troopers have to work hard to get their costumes up to code—although some find it easier than others. “I’ve heard guys say they can finish their armor in a week or two, working nonstop with fast-acting glue,” says Ed daSilva, CO of the Golden Gate Garrison in Northern California, who built his costume in two months. “If you can handle PVC, plumbing, irrigation work, it’s similar.”
Despite substantial economic pressure, the 501st has not succumbed to any kind of black market of armor making. Nor does it encourage the purchase of even Lucasfilm-licensed Stormtrooper replica suits. “Why would you want to spend $800 on eBay,” daSilva says, “when you could spend $400 and be part of a club that sets standards for high quality?”
Some members sell pieces here and there, but “we stick to a simple rule of selling costumes at-cost, so there is no temptation to commercialize this,” says Johnson. He describes the legion as “an eclectic and bohemian collective that trades tips and works to make good armor.” There’s money at stake, but it’s not for them. Simply by appearing at charity events, the 501st helped raise $262,329 for all kinds of good causes in 2013, roughly double the amount raised the previous year.
A charity-loving, democratic bohemian collective of craft-minded Stormtroopers? Hard as it is to believe, it works: the 501st is getting stronger all the time. They get a lot of love from Lucasfilm—which invites the local Golden Gate Garrison to early screenings of new Star Wars animated fare at the Presidio headquarters—and they reciprocate with loyalty. This rambunctious democratic group will close ranks when it comes to the Creator’s company. They’ll not only work any Lucasfilm event for free but appear in any Lucasfilm-endorsed commercial (such as a recent Nissan ad in Japan, which featured a red Stormtrooper standing out from a pack of white ones).
It’s often hard to figure out who’s getting the better end of the deal, Lucasfilm or the legion. For example, at Lucasfilm’s Celebration Europe II, held in Essen, Germany, in 2013, you could wander the vast show floor and find that the attractions pulling the largest crowds were provided by various branches of the 501st. The Belgian garrison provided a life-size TIE fighter they’d constructed, and it was Celebration’s most popular photo spot—closely followed by a twenty-foot-tall, wooden AT-AT, also constructed in Belgium and signed by Lucas (“May the Force NOT be with you, Imperial dogs!” he wrote). On the one hand, Lucasfilm has at its disposal a passionate, disciplined, and creative militia—the kind of fans any company would kill for—for free. On the other, the legion gets more genuine value and cachet out of making this stuff in the first place than any company could accrue. Lucasfilm would never dare offend it, and it gets to sit on the front line of fandom, exactly where it wants to be.
The legion has made itself indispensable. It has inducted a select hundred or so authors, actors, and Lucasfilm employees as honorary members; you could spot them across the Celebration halls in their metallic badges with multicolored squares in the style of Imperial officers. The legion hosted an extremely exclusive dinner, with most of the stars of the original trilogy in attendance; the media couldn’t get anywhere near it. The space soldiers have become the hottest ticket in the hottest franchise on Earth.
It’s strange, then, that one man who had an enviable role in bringing the soldiers into being in the first place all those years ago has become something of a pariah in the Star Wars community.
If you want to see where the iconic plastic armor for Lucas’s army of space soldiers first sprang into three-dimensional life, you have to go to Twickenham, a leafy old suburb in the far southwest of London just down the road from Elstree, where the original Star Wars was shot. Here, across from a bucolic cricket green, in a building that was formerly a Dickensian candy shop, you will find the polar opposite of the 501st: a one-man operation producing Stormtrooper armor for commercial gain, more interested in asserting his rights than he is in the subject of Star Wars, and most definitely not licensed by Lucasfilm. You will find a man who beat Lucas in court, sort of, but is losing his appeal in the court of fandom. You will begin to unravel the curious case of Andrew Ainsworth.
Ainsworth is a wiry, friendly fellow with a neatly trimmed black and white beard and a twinkle in his eye. He’s an industrial designer, skilled in vacuum forming, and he gets especially animated discussing the quality of reflected light that makes these uniforms look like much more than plastic. At such moments, Ainsworth looks quite a bit younger than his sixty-four years.
When I met Ainsworth at his shop, we sat for hours drinking cups of tea amid Stormtrooper replicas. Ainsworth brought out to me what he claimed was one of the first Stormtrooper helmets ever made. He told the story behind the helmet—how his friend, artist Nick Pemberton, got him involved in the production of Star Wars in January 1976. Pemberton told Ainsworth to buy him a pint if anything came of it. “I had no idea what it was,” he says. “I thought it was a puppet show; Nick used to work on those for television.”
Pemberton brought Ainsworth a maquette of the Stormtrooper helmet that was based on Lucasfilm concept sketches and paintings. Ainsworth had an oversized vacuum-forming machine he used to make plastic canoes and fish ponds; Pemberton asked Ainsworth if he could make the helmet prototype. He made one in two days. “He took that in to Lucas, and Lucas said, ‘That’s great—I’ll have fifty more,’” says Ainsworth. The production was rushing to get sets and costumes to Tunisia at the time. Ainsworth remembers a line of white limos idling outside the shop, each one waiting for the next helmet. “The studio was so keen to get them, as soon as we finished one they’d drive away with it,” he chuckles.
As he told the story, Ainsworth fiddled with the rim of the supposedly historic helmet, causing a little tear in the side. He didn’t even blink. The Star Wars fan, the historian, the preservationist in me all want to scream at him: No, stop, put that thing under glass! This was my first inkling that Ainsworth, despite his boasting of a place in the franchise’s history—and it is, alas, a rather expandable thing, this boasting of his—failed to get the idea of Star Wars.
Ainsworth and his partner, Bernadette, have been together since the 1960s, when he used to make cars in shipping crates outside her south London flat. Then they bought this former candy shop and founded Shepperton Design Studios. No one disputes that SDS produced Stormtrooper helmets and armor, TIE fighter pilot helmets, Rebel pilot helmets, and Rebel troop helmets—all from outside the UK studio system, which was rigidly controlled by unions at the time. Ainsworth’s uncredited role made him £30,000—more than most of the names that showed up on screen at the end of Star Wars.
And that was the last of his involvement with the franchise. Ainsworth showed remarkably little interest in the Star Wars phenomenon as it exploded around the world, and only caught the original movie once on TV years later. In the late 1990s, looking to pay school fees for his kids, he dug up the old forming tools, made another batch of helmets, and tried selling them at a local market. He found few buyers, and they ended up on the top of the bedroom wardrobe. In 2002, Bernadette declared she was going to sell them online. Ainsworth says he didn’t think they’d get a penny; as it turned out, when they were listed on Christie’s as “original” helmets, they got $4,000 each. Shepperton Design Studios launched its website and went into the Stormtrooper helmet business in 2003. After selling nineteen helmets to customers in the United States for £35 apiece, Ainsworth got a call from Howard Roffman, head of Lucas Licensing. Ainsworth recounts the call:
“Who are you?” Roffman demanded.
“I’m the guy who made these Stormtrooper helmets.”
“No, you’re not. We did.”
Lucasfilm legal does not mess around. The company promptly sued and won a $20 million punitive judgment against Ainsworth in a US court. A UK bailiff brought Ainsworth the demand some weeks later. Ever affable, Ainsworth made the bailiff a cup of tea.
After four years of fighting Lucasfilm in the UK High Court of Justice, Court of Appeal, and finally Supreme Court, Ainsworth won something of a split decision. The Supreme Court ruled that the US judgment was enforceable in the United Kingdom. Ainsworth was still on the hook for $4 million, all for selling nineteen Stormtrooper helmets in the United States.*
But the court also ruled that Stormtrooper costumes were props—not sculpture, as Lucasfilm had insisted. It was an important distinction: the copyright on sculpture lasts for seventy-five years in the United Kingdom; the copyright on props runs out after fifteen. So while Ainsworth had an enormous legal bill, he was also free to keep selling Stormtrooper helmets and armor. And sell them he does, for hundreds of pounds apiece, along with “original Dark Lord” costumes and “original R2 Droids”—so original, apparently, he dare not fully name the characters.
One of Ainsworth’s legal tactics was to countersue Lucas, on the grounds that he had designed the Stormtrooper costume himself and Lucas was breaching his copyright. This patently ridiculous claim was thrown out of court, but that hasn’t stopped Ainsworth repeating it ever since. In 2013, Ainsworth participated in a London art show at the Saatchi Gallery in which various artists were given Stormtrooper helmets as canvases; he was described on the gallery literature as “the creator of the Stormtrooper.” I wasn’t surprised to read that the High Court judge had described him as “viewing events through his own Ainsworth-tinted spectacles.”
Ainsworth made something of a splash in Star Wars forums around the time of his court case, but fans soon suspected they were dealing with someone who didn’t seem to know very much about the franchise and was willing to make up his own details. For example, his explanation in one interview for why he didn’t work on The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi is that Lucas didn’t return to the United Kingdom after his experience with the unions (which is untrue). He claims that his armor was reused on the subsequent movies and that it “looked pretty ratty by the end”; in fact, the armor was recast for Return of the Jedi. It’s not surprising that he didn’t know that, because he told me he had only watched Star Wars once on television, and neither of the other movies of the classic trilogy.
It’s a shame, because Ainsworth did play a small but vital role in the making of the original film, and somewhere under his miasma of self-justification and faulty memory is a small business success story. The judge gives him credit for the design of the X-wing pilot’s helmet, for instance, because the Marine helmet he was supposed to be basing the design on never arrived from the United States. At nearly forty years distance, however, it is doubtful whether this particular tale will ever be objectively told.
Adding to the confusion is the testimony of Brian Muir, a sculptor who worked at Elstree and sculpted the maquette, or scale model, for Vader’s helmet, which was made in-house out of heavier fiberglass. In court, Muir claimed that the Stormtrooper helmet was sculpted not by Ainsworth’s friend Nick Pemberton but by another sculptor, Liz Moore, who also sculpted the prototype Threepio costume. (Moore died tragically young some years later.)
In court, Muir’s claim was quickly thrown into question. Moore’s boyfriend at the time testified that she sculpted in a different kind of clay than the one seen in the only photo of the Stormtrooper sculpture that exists. The judge found that Pemberton, not Moore, sculpted the Stormtrooper helmet, which makes sense: How else would Ainsworth have become involved in the first place, except through his friend Pemberton? But that didn’t stop Muir from taking to the Internet—including 501st forums—with vehement attacks on Ainsworth and a spirited defense of Liz Moore’s memory.
Digging deeper into Muir’s story, however, it becomes clear that he isn’t actually claiming to have firsthand knowledge of Moore’s sculpture—just that other unnamed people in the crew told him she had produced it. Muir told me in a testy email explaining why he didn’t want to be interviewed that it “actually doesn’t matter” who sculpted the helmet—“so long as it wasn’t Ainsworth.”*
The contrast between these tangled tales and the more laudable efforts of Albin Johnson and Mark Fordham is dramatic, but also instructive. When Star Wars fans work for free, fired up by a love of the franchise, you get the 501st. But when there’s business at stake, a chance to make some money from the phenomenon, you get unseemly feuds like Ainsworth’s and Muir’s. It’s the kind of unintended consequence that the Creator, sketching space soldiers in art class, could never have foreseen.
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* The only time a Stormtrooper is named in Star Wars is on the Death Star, where a commanding officer asks TK-421 why he isn’t at his post. Johnson adopted this naming convention, using his birthday for the numbers. The 501st has since used up all its possible three- and four-digit TK numbers.
* The Society for Creative Anachronism, an organization dedicated to celebrating the medieval and renaissance periods through activities like reproducing historic armor and clothing, has more than thirty thousand paid-up members—and a thirty-one-year head start on the 501st.
* As great a compliment as that is, Johnson is uneasy about the fact that the 501st were heading into the temple to help kill Jedi children—including one played by Lucas’s son Jett. This made for an awkward encounter years later, when Jett asked Johnson if he could become an honorary member of the 501st.
* After Disney bought Lucasfilm, the company settled with Ainsworth for a mere £90,000. Ainsworth was still stuck with legal fees around a million pounds.
* In 2011, after the Supreme Court gave Ainsworth the go-ahead to continue selling Stormtrooper helmets and armor, another UK company called RS Prop Masters happened to start selling its own screen-accurate Stormtrooper suits, recast from a set of armor from the original movie that had been found in an attic. Muir added his endorsement. His daughter started a Facebook page devoted to ridiculing the quality of Ainsworth’s Stormtrooper reproductions. The feud between Muir and Ainsworth, it seems, has moved into the marketplace.