(crowd murmurs)
- Okay, so today is super exciting for us.
Because we are with basically Star Wars royalty.
If you're a big Star Wars nerd,
you already know who this guy is.
But for those of you that aren't
cool enough to know that already,
this is Steve Sansweet.
- Hello.
- He is an icon in the Star Wars fan community.
He has kind of elevated fandom
to something that is collaborative with creators.
A really exciting experience for everybody.
So we're gonna talk to him about it.
But what a lot of people know him from is collecting.
This guy has literally written the book,
and many, about Star Wars collecting.
Okay, how did your collection start?
- It started with one object.
I had been collecting Japanese robots and space toys.
Star Wars came out, blew me away.
But I had previously gotten a brochure
that 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm sent out
to try to get movie theaters to book movies, unsuccessfully.
And they also sent some to journalists.
It came to the guy at the Wall Street Journal
who was writing about films at the time.
- Gotcha.
- And he tossed it.
And he left a little early, and all the other reporters
being yakety-yaks, I didn't want to just deliberate--
So I sort of sidled over to the trash can.
It was my first dumpster diving for Star Wars,
but by far not the last.
(laughs)
- There's treasure in trash, y'all.
- Oh, yeah.
- So, as your collection started to grow,
at what point did you really
realize it was something special?
- Well, I had a one-story house on stilts
east of Hollywood, in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles.
That then became a two-story house.
That then became a three-story house.
And one storage locker became five.
And by that time, I sort of realized
that yeah, I had a lot of stuff.
And actually, in the mid to late 80's,
a lot of collectors were getting out of Star Wars.
There was no promise of any more movies.
- Right.
- They were getting divorces
and had to monetize the collection.
And I took advantage of all of that.
And I vastly increased my collection
with things I never knew existed before.
This was before the Internet.
We didn't know a whole lot.
So, I spent a lot of money in the late 80's
when there was nothing Star Wars new out there.
- Yeah.
- Taking pieces of collections that had been
built with love and passion earlier.
- Those of us that are into Star Wars
like to call those the dark times.
(laughs)
- They were, in a way. But they were good for me.
- So, what is your favorite piece in your collection?
I know that's a very Sophie's Choice question.
- Usually, I answer that by like,
"Okay, how many kids do you have?"
"Oh, four."
"Well, who's your favorite?"
Sometimes the person says.
But I think the most significant piece to me is a banner.
It's eight feet long. It's canvas.
It has wood poles in the top and bottom.
And this is the banner that Lucasfilm
took to conventions in 1976,
a year before Star Wars came out.
A guy named Charlie Lippincott,
who was head of marketing and merchandising
and publicity and everything else
really started what we know today
as fan relations by going out.
He was a comic book geek himself.
So he was at the sixth
San Diego Comic-Con.
They had a room that wasn't quite full.
It was showing slides, talking about the comic book.
And he had a table.
And because Lucasfilm didn't have a lot of money,
they were selling the first poster
instead of giving it away, for $1.75.
Today, you can't touch it for less than 1,000, of course.
And they had this banner on the table.
And then it showed up at Worldcon in September,
where Mark Hamill and Gary Kurtz, the producer were there.
And they had a room of props.
Anyway, that banner ended up in my collection.
And about eight years ago, Ralph McQuarrie was over.
The great Ralph McQuarrie.
- [Woman] Oh, amazing.
- And he said, "Hmm, I remember painting that banner."
(laughs)
- And I said, "You hand-painted a can--?"
"Oh yeah, I did whatever they asked me to do."
And it has Ralph's iconic image of Starkiller,
the composite character from
the first draft of the screenplay,
who became Luke, a little bit of Han,
a little bit of Obi-Wan.
And a much different logo that was done
by the artist that created the poster
for the iconic Endless Summer movie.
The surfing movie.
He did a lot of Phil Graham posters and things like that.
- Nice.
- Yeah.
- Do you just wrap yourself up in it?
- No, because it would probably crack,
which is why it's not here.
- Nice.
So, this is probably not the case.
Is there anything out there that
you've always wanted but never got your hands on?
- I made the mistake in the first interview
I ever did on my collection with
the late-lamented Starlog magazine.
And they asked me "What's your holy grail?".
And this was like, '87, '88.
And I said, "You know, I always regret
"passing up the Return of the Jedi
"kid's bicycle at Toys R Us, $70.
"I'd love to get it mint in the box."
And when the article came out about two months later,
that first week, I got a call from a dealer
on the west coast and the east coast.
"We've got your bike!"
"Yeah, how much?"
And they each quoted the same price.
- Exorbitant?
- $2,000.
(laughs)
I said, "I'll pass".
Even back then, I wasn't that crazy.
Nor did I have the money.
I eventually got it for a lot less money.
- Okay, how many people ask you
to value their Blue Snaggletooth?
(laughs)
- You know, people come and ask me to do evaluations.
I think they know by now that
the main answer is "Well, its worth or value is
"what somebody else is willing to pay for it.
"I can't tell you that, because I'm not in the market."
And I did two price guides years ago.
But the only reason I wanted to do the price guides
was to get the information out there
on all the stuff that was available.
The prices are set one way.
You wanna know what a price for something should be?
Look on Ebay for completed sales.
And if you can find a recent completed sale
of what you wanna price, that's the price.
- So, this one might be tricky.
We're in the Rebels era.
Rebels is getting really, really popular,
'cause it's super awesome.
There's a lot of complaining about
not being able to get the female characters
like Sabine and Hera, and Chopper is really hard to find.
I'm still on the hunt for mine.
What are your thoughts on how that
could maybe shift and how it could be fixed?
- I think the problem is distribution
and what Hasbro expected in terms of numbers.
And the fact that they know that
in the original movies, the sales of
Leia characters were way low.
Nobody bought all those beautiful
Amidala dolls for Episode I.
- [Woman] I did. I bought every one of them.
- I did, too!
- Yes!
- So, we both have them in our collection. They're amazing.
- They're gorgeous.
- But they have to realize that with
girl geek power these days,
these are things with Ashley Eckstein and her universe.
It's a matter of cost versus
what people are buying versus assortments.
You have to really be on that.
You've got quick feedback,
but it takes time to produce these things.
- Well, and stores have to buy in
and be willing to place the orders.
- Well, they do, and people complain, "Oh, Hasbro!".
Well, Hasbro would love to sell
a lot more stuff to the stores.
But if the retailers aren't buying, I get disappointed.
I go into our local Wal-Mart,
which is sort of a grade D Wal-Mart.
And at Christmas time, they had
no Star Wars section on the shelf.
What?
And Target, which does have
a pretty good Star Wars section,
it's always empty, because people are buying it all right.
- It's all peg warmers.
- And people assume, of course,
that I'm sent one of everything.
No.
I go out and I go out to Toys R Us
and make my runs to Target just like everybody else.
- Just like the rest of us.
So, you are not only just a big fan
of Star Wars, you're an insider.
You worked for Lucasfilm for 15 years.
Tell us what that was about.
- Well, I never thought I would
leave my job at the Wall Street Journal.
I had a wonderful job, the best job in journalism.
I was Bureau Chief in Los Angeles for nine years.
But they said, "You've overstayed your welcome by a factor."
They always like to move new people in.
And so they wanted me to go back to New York
or do something else in LA.
And I got this call out of the blue from Lucasfilm
from Lynne Hale, the head of publicity,
who I knew because I was writing Star Wars books,
saying, "Steve, we're looking for a suggestion
"of someone who might be willing to come and,
"one year-only job, guaranteed one year-only,
"to go out, and somebody that we can have on our payroll."
Paid for by Fox.
At 1/3 of the salary I was making
at the Wall Street Journal.
And go out and do maybe eight to 10
fan conventions for the special editions.
The worst idea in the world.
So naturally, I took it.
(laughs)
I followed my bliss, as Joseph Campbell would say.
- Well, you ended up putting together
a lot of the starwars.com team
and getting that out there.
And kind of really setting a lot of groundwork
for what is completely commonplace
for fan interaction today.
- I was there when we pressed the button
for starwars.com to go live
in the outer office of the then-president of Lucasfilm.
And we're all looking at it,
and the lawyer was looking at it.
And in the early days, president of Lucasfilm
was a really nice guy, but really detail-oriented.
Every story that ran on starwars.com.
And we refreshed at least once a week, or tried to.
(laughs)
He had to look at and hand-edit every piece of copy.
That was fun.
- Oh my goodness.
- That eventually tailed off.
- Nice.
Now, you retired from Lucasfilm
to set up Rancho Obi-Wan.
- I retired in April 2011.
And I had been looking towards retirement
and thinking "what am I gonna do?".
The sands and beaches of Maui sounded really --
I can't retire.
And I have this passion for Star Wars
I've had since the beginning.
And so, we had a really nice sort of warehouse
at that point, about 6,000 square feet
of former chicken barn.
There were egg-laying chickens in there until the 70's.
There's still some chicken souls floating around.
(laughs)
But you know, I had friends who came over.
But it really was set up more as a warehouse.
And you can go look at all the stuff.
But it was open and on the shelves.
And that's when my associate, Anne Neumann,
who has now been with us for nine years.
Anne said, "Set a park here."
I said, "I can't charge people for tours."
And they said, "No, but a non-profit could."
And so that's when we decided
to incorporate Rancho Obi-Wan,
become a 501c3, and the money we raise
goes towards maintenance and security
and utilities and things like that.
But all the things in the collection are mine.
It's my ridiculousness and spending.
(laughs)
And I rent that to Rancho Obi-Wan for zero a year.
Same thing with the buildings.
And so, we became a non-profit
and that has become a full-time job.
- Well, because you guys do a lot of outreach.
You don't just let people come to the museum,
you give lectures, you do education.
Can you talk a little bit about how
you're kind of using Star Wars and Rancho Obi-Wan
to really give some pretty high-level community benefit?
- We love having visits that we don't charge for.
For schoolkids or other associational groups.
And we talk about whatever the teacher
would like us to talk about.
Creativity, jobs in the film industry.
My favorite is obviously to talk about creativity.
As you see in our booth here, we have
artists and fans who have been so inspired
by the passion that they have for Star Wars
that they want to create things.
And the thing about Lucasfilm, from the very beginning,
is that it has been open.
Well, there have been some missteps along the way early on.
- [Woman] As anyone would make.
- But yeah, it has really been open
to the fan community in so many ways,
and that includes letting fans play in George's sandbox.
It's a huge galaxy, there's so many things to do.
There's so many people who have been inspired by Star Wars.
A lot of them artists, people
going into filmmaking, astronauts.
I mean, we've had a lightsaber up in space.
- So what is your ideal vision for Rancho Obi-Wan?
Like in the future, what do you want it to be?
And what are the long-term plans?
- Long, long term is something
that I'm giving serious consideration to now.
I'd like the collection to be preserved,
as most collectors would.
But it's a huge collection.
We've got over half a million unique pieces in it.
Only a fraction of it is on display.
And an even tinier fraction, maybe 1/15th of 1%
is here at Star Wars Celebration Anaheim.
I would like to preserve the legacy of what I've acquired,
'cause this particular collection
could never be put together again.
And a lot of it is my personality
and what I love as well as the basic,
all the action figures and things like that.
For the near-term future,
have you been over to the starwars.com area?
The cantina? The beautiful set that they have built?
- [Woman] Yes, I yearn to sleep there at night.
- [Steve] Well, maybe you'll have the chance
at Rancho Obi-Wan, because they've offered it to me.
- Don't dangle that carrot, Steve.
- We will probably have to do an Amish barn raising
in order to get a facility to cover it.
But they don't want to destroy it.
They can't keep storing it.
So we'll see what we can do.
- Yeah, it's huge. Oh, that's awesome.
So there you have it.
Basically, creativity, joy, and delight.
And if you're a fan, you kind of owe a debt to this guy.
Tell us how we can find you.
- You can go online to ranchoobiwan.org
and find all about becoming a member for $40 a year.
There's no more Star Wars Fan Club.
And we always used to look forward
to getting those packets every year.
We do that now.
We have patches and pins and all kinds of cool stuff.
And that also enables you to take a tour of Rancho Obi-Wan.
We basically schedule a minimum
of two tours a week, on Fridays and Saturdays.
And I lead all the tours.
And it's not just going into the museum.
It's three to four hours if you can stand that long.
And it's my personal stories and anecdotes
about all of these wonderful items, how they came about,
some behind-the-scenes stories
that I probably shouldn't be telling.
- Juicy.
- Yes, there's some juicy.
And some things I'm rather proud of
and some things I'm less proud of.
- Perfect. So, check it out.
Because seriously, this is some amazing stuff
and you're missing out if you don't know about it.
- [Steve] This magnificent painting
is the world's largest Star Wars oil painting,
done by an artist in San Francisco, Robert Xavier Burden.
So it's called "20th Century Space Opera".
And it's Robert's toys that he played with.