10 Things We Learned From Colbert-Abrams ‘Star Wars’ Talk
They came via hyperdrive and warp speed, and even by New Jersey Transit, these devotees of Stars both Trek and Wars to mix with the high-rolling, arts-underwriting swells at a benefit performance for the Montclair Film Festival. But mostly, these disciples of sci-fi’s top-shelf franchises made a pilgrimage to the Garden State to watch Stephen Colbert host a two-hour “celebrity nerd-off” with director J.J. Abrams, just three-and-a-half weeks before the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. If you listened closely on Saturday night, you could hear a million-ish voices (technically 2,800) suddenly crying out in fandom bliss.
The two-hour chat took place in the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark which, as anyone who took the walk from the nearby train station could tell you, has more than a bit of a Mos Eisely Spaceport. Walking onto the main stage — which was dressed like a typical chat show, only with Stormtrooper mugs instead of ones with The Late Show logo — the duo proceeded to swap stories, drop science about their favorite sci-fi/fantasy universes and yes, tease the hell out of The Force Awakens. Here were 10 things we learned from this genuinely geektastic event.
1. This almost was a reunion
Colbert queried Abrams about his career in mostly chronological order, starting with the director’s quick transition from undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College to becoming a working Hollywood screenwriter. Abrams, who got a bug for fiction after he “B.S.-ed his way through a non-fiction writing course, faking everything,” hitched his wagon to another student, Jill (daughter of Paul) Mazursky, who had already set up some scripts. They quickly sold a screenplay called Filofax, which eventually became the James Belushi/Charles Grodin comedy Taking Care of Business (1990).
Colbert was quite familiar with the film; when he was a struggling comedian living in Chicago, he auditioned for a part. “Probably for the best,” Abrams demurred when Colbert recalled that he didn’t receive a callback.
2. Abrams once got a tongue in the mail
The first movie Abrams ever saw was Mary Poppins — but the first adult film (no, not that kind of adult film, though Colbert admitted that could make for good conversation, too) was The Exorcist. But the potentially scarring event merely further instilled a love of filmmaking in the 10-year-old Jeffrey Jacob, who was already tooling around with Super-8 cameras. He wrote to the movie’s makeup artist Dick Smith, who sent back a curious package: a prop appendage from the movie. The delivery prompted this response from his mother: “Who is this ‘Dick’ sending you a tongue?”
Abrams later received an admonishment from Smith by mail after he wrote that he liked Rick Baker’s transformation effects in An American Werewolf in London‘s over Rob Bottin’s in The Howling; the makeup artist called to apologize for being so abrupt. (Let’s blame it on latex inhalation.)