STAR WARS Love Letter Fan Film 5-25-77 Will Finally Be Released
It has been over a decade since director Patrick Read Johnson started shooting his Star Wars fan film 5-25-77. The film is a coming-of-age drama that centers on a teenage movie geek played by John Francis Daley (Freaks and Geeks), whose life is changed by George Lucas' classic sci-fi fantasy film.
A work-in-progress cut of the film has previously been screened at Star Wars Celebration in 2007 and TIFF in 2013. Due to money issues, the movie took longer to finish than expected. Over the years the director slowly raised the funds to complete his passion project, and it's finally done. Johnson revealed in an interview with Yahoo! (via: IGN) that he just needs to clean up the final cut now.
Johnson also said that the film has a distributor and they plan to release it in theaters and VOD later this year. There's no exact date set yet, but he does say, “I can tell you that the film will come out in theaters on a significant date."
The filmmaker went on to say that fans should look out for "unconventional advertising” leading up to the release of the film. He explains that, “A few months out, you’ll start to see some things appearing around the country, and if you’ve seen the movies these things are referencing — like 2001 and Jaws — you’ll know it’s advertising before anyone else does." So we'll just have to keep our eyes peeled.
While we wait for more details, here's the synopsis and the trailer for the movie:
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away—or rather, in early-’70s Wadsworth, Illinois—Pat, a teenage geek with a big imagination, devoted his spare time and excess energy to concocting supremely amateur “sequels” to the genre cinema of the day. With his backyard and basement standing in for a Hollywood studio, he set the sights of his Super-8 on his own visions of JAWS, PLANET OF THE APES, DUEL and of course the catalyst for his crazed creativity, 2001: A SPACE ODDYSEY. His best pal Bill doesn’t entirely share his raging passion but he’s perfectly game to have his arm torn off or heart ripped out in the name of homemade sci-fi cinema—and be Pat’s comrade in discovering the delights and disasters of an average adolescent’s life. But such lives, even those in ordinary Wadsworth, have their dramatic defining moments. Pat’s arrives in a chance opportunity to visit Hollywood and while there, meet with special effects maestro Douglas Trumbull. Along that path, however, lies a fateful detour… an audience with the young, rising director Steven Spielberg, a journey through the guts of Industrial Light & Magic in its infancy, and an encounter with one George Lucas as he manically mixes up a little space-opera movie that would soon shake the foundations of cinematic art and business…