The new Netflix documentary series, "Making a Murder," is being favorably compared to the podcast "Serial" and HBO's "The Jinx"; meet the "Star Wars" fans who are members of the R2 Builders Club; Disney has a marketing challenge in China, where the first "Star Wars" movies were never seen.
The R2-D2 Builders Club takes Star Wars fandom to the next level
In the world of Star Wars fanatics, you have collectors, cos-players….and then you have people who take their fandom to the next level: Members of the R2-D2 Builders Club.
It’s an international community of Star Wars fans who dedicate countless hours — and dollars — to building exact working replicas of the lovable droid, R2-D2.
The Frame’s Michelle Lanz met a few builders to find out what drives them to dedicate their lives to R2-D2.
One of the most beloved characters in Star Wars looks more like a trashcan or a mailbox than something with a charming personality.
https://youtu.be/hhwSbHytvuU?t=23s
R2D2 is the spherical droid that tools around with his humanistic droid pal C-3PO. They're the only non-human characters to appear in all seven films. But unlike other characters in the Star Wars saga, R2D2 has inspired thousands of fans to build working replicas of his likeness, down to the most minute detail.
Keri Bean is an engineer at NASA’s JPL and she's also a member of the R2D2 Builder’s Club.
"Star Wars was not my number-one obsession until about a year ago. There was the droid builders' room at the Star Wars Celebration and there were over 100 droids in the room. When I walked in I started crying and hyperventilating at the same time, I knew I had to start immediately," said Keri.
Most members have been lifelong fans, but for Keri Bean, falling in love with R2 didn’t happen until she met him in person. Through an online forum, club members can buy and sell parts, read blueprints, download R2 voice files and troubleshoot problems with thousands of like-minded makers.
As new builders, Keri and her husband Jeff decided to build a prototype droid out of K'NEX, the children’s construction toy.
“All good engineers have test beds, so it’s a good test bed to figure out what the issues are not with K'NEX instead of later down the road when it’s an expensive aluminum build,” said Keri.
Though building an R2-D2 has gotten easier thanks to the club, it can still take two to three years to complete a full droid. That is, unless you’re longtime club member, Mike Senna, who completed his first R2 in just 11 months.
“Being a geeky guy you’re not really social … Then I found the R2 builders club and I said look at these guys what a bunch of weirdos. And then of course the next day I started ordering parts,” said Senna.
Now more than a decade after he first joined, Senna is a board member and regularly hosts meet ups at his house in Yorba Linda for other builders to show off their creations. But R2-D2 isn't the only robot Senna has built.
Sitting in his living room are two R2s, a Wall-E, that lovable Pixar character, and a working BB-8, the new droid that appears in The Force Awakens. He first got a peek at BB-8 earlier this year during a fan gathering know as Star Wars Celebration.
“I was right there in front dead center watching this thing roll out and my head just exploded. Just all the possibilities running through my head of how I’m going to create this in the real world,” said Senna.
It was this desire to see a fantasy in the real world that drove founder Dave Everett to start the club back in 1999. A fan of robotics, the Australia-based Everett had always loved R2D2 and decided one day that he would set out to make one of his own.
“I thought I might be the only person in the world that wanted to do something so ridiculous. It astonishes me how many people are interested in this idea," said Everett.
The club now has 25,000 members, but only a small percentage have actually built R2D2s.
“My estimate is 600 completed robots around the world and that’s a lot, given that LucasFilm only built six for the original movie. I think we’ve done pretty well,” said Everett
The club has become so proficient in fact, that two members in the UK were hired by LucasFilm and Disney to build droids for "The Force Awakens." And for years the studio has been calling on members of the R2-D2 builders club to appear at promotional events.
When some of these R2s aren’t walking red carpets, their human masters take them to visit libraries and schools to inspire kids to take up robotics. But they also go to children’s hospitals to visit sick kids.
"It's just a fantastic thing to take them out of that problem for a while, where they can see these magical characters that they never could have imagined that would meet. Really, very moving," said Everett.
“Kids and adults, they just love R2, the character is very appealing," said Mike Senna. "That one big eye maybe, everyone like a big eye."
I know what you’re thinking: There’s no way a non-engineer could do this. But Keri Bean says members of the R2-D2 Builders Club are a diverse bunch.
“They range from being dentists to opera singers to full-time Silicon Valley engineer people. I think there’s even a 7-year-old kid building in the forum right now. Everyone can do it, you just have to want to do it.”
Club founder Dave Everett agrees.
“I think a lot of people imagine they can’t do something like that, but the reality is they can, so they should just start looking at it. We’ve got members from diverse countries even in Iran. The longer you wait, the less time you’ll have with R2D2.”
Why it took 10 years to get 'Making A Murderer' to audiences
The Netflix true crime docuseries "Making A Murderer" hit viewers' streaming devices just at the right time.
Only a week after the second season of the break-out hit podcast "Serial" hit iTunes and Pandora, and last year's "The Jinx" on HBO whet pop culture's appetite for long-form documentary storytelling. But when the filmmakers behind "Making a Murder" began production they had no such audience to court.
It was 2005 when Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, fresh out of graduate film school at Columbia, read an article about Steven Avery in the New York Times. Avery, who had been released in 2003 from a wrongful, 18-year-long imprisonment, was facing a new charge: murder.
But there was a twist. The county that brought the charges was the same that Avery was suing for exoneration — to the tune of $36 million.
As Demos and Ricciardi told The Frame, they were "overwhelmed with questions," so they "went to Wisconsin trying to find some answers." They would spend the next 10 years documenting Avery's travails.
In many ways, Demos and Ricciardi were immensely lucky it took them that long to finalize their project. Not only are audiences primed for true crime storytelling, but the show now has the optimal form of distribution: Netflix.
In 2005, documentaries were largely released as two-hour features, to say nothing of the phenomenon of online streaming. Now, as television has become more cutting-edge, and binge-watching series has become something of a cultural norm, Netflix has led the field in producing the type of high-quality, episodic filmmaking that "Making a Murderer" required.
The series has since become a huge hit, as many people binged the show over the holidays. More than 130,000 people signed a White House petition asking for the president to pardon Avery (which the White House declined to do).
Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi discussed the origin of their project, their influences, and the struggles they encountered while making the series when they met in studio with The Frame's John Horn.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
At what point do you realize this is not going to be a film, but a series? How did that change your process?
Laura Ricciardi: A few months into our production, there was a major development. What had been, from the state’s perspective, a very strong circumstantial evidence case — they now thought they had compelling evidence to bring him to trial and get a conviction. So we knew we were going to be in it for the long haul . . . It already was an epic story. It started in the mid-1980's, and here we were in the beginning of our production in 2005. So we were going to document the first 20 years and then shoot vérité-style for whatever was to come.
In the last two years, two things have happened. “Serial” has come out and been a huge hit, and “The Jinx” has been on HBO, another series about the guilt or innocence in a crime. As you’re watching these shows come out, does it change the way in which you see your own material, and do you think it benefits the investment of time you’ve made?
Demos: It’s an interesting question. We sometimes joke, it was a good thing it took us this long to lock picture. It does seem like a great time for “Making a Murderer” to be reaching an audience. But that said, the things that inspired us to make this, and the things that influenced our style of filmmaking go back so much further. To “Paradise Lost,” to “The Staircase,” to “The Thin Blue Line.” Or even outside of this genre, to Barbara Kopple’s “American Dream.” The intimacy that they offered and the way they captured a moment and real-life characters in such a compelling way really inspired us to take this on.
Over the course of your work on this series, something else changed in documentaries. And that is the means of distribution evolved dramatically. Two questions: what does that evolution in distribution mean to you and your film, and how did you come to be on Netflix?
Demos: I mean, we owe everything to that evolution. In 2006, we discovered that this was more than a feature. And in 2006, where were we going to bring something that was more than a feature? We went to film markets thinking, Well, I’ll just squeeze it into a feature. Maybe they’ll be interested.
But that was one of our greatest challenges, when we think back over the struggles of the past decade. Staying true to the knowledge that this story, in order to be told properly, needed a long format. And we needed to not go for the two-hour time slot, or the four-part series. That we really needed to tell this story right. Because one of the things that kept us going was, when we were out there filming, we were seeing not just a lot of the story being missed by the news, but we were even seeing history being rewritten, as they would talk about the past.
We started to feel that if we did not get this story out that it would be lost. So, it was two years ago that we connected with Netflix. By that point, you know, as two young filmmakers that don’t have a long list of credits, we knew that we had to demonstrate what this could be and that we could pull this off. So we actually had three episodes cut. And we had the outline of the whole series. So by the time we brought it to them, they could see what it really could be.
The entire 10-part series, "Making a Murderer" premieres on Netflix December 18th.