The Secrets of Star Wars' Success

For some, is more than a cool couple of hours in a darkened theater.

The Force Is With All of Us

Paula Rosenberg has the kind of job that could make anyone a tad paranoid. She's an administrator for the bioterrorism program at the Centers for Disease Control, a position she landed just before 9/11. She plans responses to potential germ warfare attacks: anthrax letters, aerosol smallpox, crop-dusters spraying plague across the heartland. Watching her outfit her suburban Atlanta basement with drywall, tan carpeting and towers of pine shelving, a visitor might be forgiven for assuming Rosenberg is constructing her own fortified bunker.

Never fear -- she's not bracing for The Big One. In fact, she stays cool, calm and collected precisely because of what she's moving into her cellar: some 22,000 pieces of Star Wars memorabilia. Rosenberg has been amassing the collection since 1977, the year George Lucas released the first installment of his six-film space opera, when Rosenberg turned nine. Although her parents initially banned the movie as too violent, she spent the summer buying Star Wars bubblegum cards from the local convenience store and devouring the movie novelization. When her mom finally let her see the film, Rosenberg recalls, "I was rendered mute for two hours afterward, I was so enthralled. Star Wars has always been my escape, since Day One."

This month the last film in the cycle, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, invades multiplexes nationwide. (As any nine-year-old can tell you, Episodes IV through VI, charting Luke Skywalker's rise to Jedi knighthood, were the first to appear; Episodes I through III are prequels chronicling the transformation of Luke's father, Anakin Skywalker, into the evil Darth Vader.) And if the past is any prelude, the new movie will be a blockbuster: The first five Star Wars entries stand as the most popular series in cinematic history, with grosses of $3.4 billion. The films' vocabulary has entered the idiom, cropping up everywhere from Pentagon programs to hip-hop videos. By now, the Force is with nearly all of us.

For some, however, Star Wars is more than a cool couple of hours in a darkened theater. No one knows exactly how many people order their leisure time around Lucas's imaginary universe, but official fan clubs, with 200,000 members, are just the tip of the iceberg. This year's Star Wars convention is expected to draw 30,000 enthusiasts. And an Internet search turns up more than 5,000 fan sites -- forums for online role-players, costume makers and collectors aiming to scoop up every Boba Fett figurine made.

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