The director approaches his Star Wars interviewees with obvious glee, but he’s also on a quest.

A scene from “Elstree 1976.”

By Neil Giordano

I saw Star Wars when it first hit movie screens in 1977. I was six-years-old and my father was worried about me being scared of the aliens and violent imagery. He remembers that I thrilled to the fun of the action sequences and its good-vs.-evil moralism. Yes, I was a part of the initial Star Wars generation, growing up with action figures and bedsheets and lunchboxes, and I unapologetically carry with me plenty of nostalgia for the first trilogy, knowing now as an adult and an avid film fan that they weren’t the greatest movies of all time. Still, like the Force, their cultural importance stays with us.

For obsessive fans, the original trilogy — plus the prequels and the assorted stories, comics, animated shows, books, and now the new Disney-branded movie — is fuel for a lifetime of super-fandom. These are the kind of fanatics who know every characters’ name and backstory and family history, every gesture they made on screen, and the place of each in the lore that has become the  Star Wars “canon.” And sometimes they even know the names of the actors who played the figures they worship.

The new documentary Elstree 1976: The Making of Star Wars — part comedy, part tragedy, part anthropological study of the grungy side of moviemaking — is made up of interviews with some of the hapless souls who played trivial parts in the trilogy. These talking heads are the bit-part actors, doomed for eternity to be known by millions of people worldwide yet to remain almost completely anonymous, except to the most devoted fans. The film had a short theatrical release nationwide in May. It can currently be streamed from YouTube, Vudu, Amazon, and will be on Netflix by month’s end.

Directed by Joe Spira, whose Anyone Can Play Guitar explored the impact of a music subculture, this documentary examines another marginal world from a different angle. Whereas Trekkies peered closely at the fanboys and girls who loved Star Trek, Elstree 1976 hones in on the other side of the equation: the objects of devotion themselves, in this case, the minor gods of the Star Wars pantheon. The director approaches his interviewees with obvious glee, but he’s also on a quest. It’s as if an irreverent drama scholar were to make a film about performers who played Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in productions of Hamlet (which is not a bad idea): he is fascinated by the plight of actors who play interchangeable, ultimately disposable, characters.

Though here, instead of the Bard’s two-faced, quickly dispatched dupes, we have the pop-culture icon Boba Fett, along with “X-Wing Pilot” and “Cantina Waitress,” and the Stormtrooper who utters the famous line “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for” (actually, he’s a “Sandtrooper” in trilogy-speak, a fact I confirmed on Wookiiepedia).

Elstree 1976 (Elstree was the name of the London studio where the first Star Wars was filmed) gives us compact glimpses into the lives of the people behind these tiny roles, some of them actors of repute, some of them folks who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to serve as extras. A number of them continue to make a living off the fame Star Wars brought them; others struggle to cash in.

Marred at times by redundancies and some poor editing choices, Ellstree 1976 makes good use of extreme close-ups of Star Wars action figures, which take on a fetishistic power. These are not the iconic images of Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia, but figurines of the short-lived Greedo and an unnamed Rebel Alliance Guard, rare finds for memorabilia collectors. One of the cultural ironies is that actors who played these action figures are in many cases not as valuable as the merchandise. The performers are detritus, left in the wake of the mega-selling-colossus that Star Wars became. The thespians are worth something, but only in the secondary market of fan gatherings, endless autograph signings, and Comic-Con-style conventions.

Some of them are bitter. David Prowse, who played the towering physical presence of Darth Vader on screen, continues to make most of his income from selling autographed pictures at conventions. He continues to hold a grudge against director George Lucas for not using his voice for Vader’s famous imperious growl. He gloats over a memory of lunch with Alec Guinness, followed by a sparring session to prepare for their light saber duel; it’s like hearing a defensive lineman at his high school reunion namedrop that he once sacked Tom Brady in a game 40 years ago.

Not all of the interviewees are as tragic as Prowse. Garrick Hagon, who played Biggs Kicklighter (Luke Skywalker’s friend, a part mostly cut from the movie), comes across as affable and grounded — he’s a Shakespearean actor who has enjoyed a career of modest success. Another, Paul Blake, reminisces about putting on the Greedo costume — still smoldering from an application of cheap special effects — so that he could slump dead over the table in front of Han Solo. Despite a successful stage career, he boasts with genuine enthusiasm: “My epitaph may read ‘Paul Blake, he played Greedo’ ….and that’s great!”

Like Blake, many of them enjoy their place in film history, however microscopic. Though some take self-admiration to the level of mock-u-mentary, particularly Anthony Forrest (who spoke the famous “droids” line). Forrest played another role in the film that never made it out of the editing room. He wonders, unconvincingly,  whether the latter bit was even more important because only true fans know about its existence.

All the actors see the time they spent on the set as something special; they cherish their fond memories. Pam Rose, the one woman among the interviewees (she was the Cantina waitress, with the prosthetic head) is especially moving because she accepts her consummate ordinariness. She worked part-time in the 1970s taking roles as extras and stand-ins before giving it up. “I didn’t do it to be famous,” she says without a touch of irony. For her, it was just a regular job, not an opportunity to make pop culture history. On her mantle next to family photos is a snapshot with some of the other bit players on set.

We end up caring about these players, touched by their humanity and smiling with them (sometimes at them) as they try to make sense of their semi-celebrity-making experiences. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead showed us the Bard’s tragedy from point of view of the eponymous title characters; Ellstree 1976 proves that are a number of ways of looking at a profitable fantasy — even the minor figures, disposable as they are, have a story to tell.

Neil Giordano teaches film and creative writing in Newton. His work as an editor, writer, and photographer has appeared in Harper’s, Newsday, Literal Mind, and other publications. Giordano previously was on the original editorial staff of DoubleTake magazine and taught at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.