As George Lucas has always said, he was only able to bring the vast mythology of the Star Wars movies to life with the collaborative assistance of countless talented craftsmen and technicians, and he is very grateful to every single one of them and wishes them only the best, unless he catches one of them trying to use their connection to his movies to make a buck. That's what Andrew Ainsworth is finding out, the hard way. Ainsworth is a British prop designer who, back in 1976, was contracted to produce the helmets and armor worn by the imperial Stormtroopers in the original Star Wars. In 2004, Ainsworth says that he happened to stumble across one of the original molds in a cupboard and began making new helmets to sell on his website. Then, two years later, the empire struck back: Lucasfilm hauled Ainsworth and his company, Shepperton Design Studios, into court in California and won a $20 million suit for copyright infringement. Now the case is being replayed in England, where Lucas wants the judgement affirmed.
The court's decision involves not just ancient contractual agreements--it seems there was never a formal agreement between the two parties, and if things end up going Ainsworth's way, he can turn around and countersue for a cut of thirty years' worth of merchandising profits-- but the nature of Ainsworth's contribution to the enterprise. Opening remarks by Lucasfilm's attorney Michael Bloch seemed to indicate that he will attempt to show that Ainsworth couldn't possibility deserve any of the credit for the power and effectiveness of the overall visual concept, which he called "one of the most iconic images in modern culture," because he was just a hired hand realizing a piece of "industrial design", and not a true, ahem, artist. “What we are dealing with is characters of the imagination,” Bloch intoned. Stressing the imaginative aspect, he went on to insist that the armor and helmet would actually “not stand you in good stead if you were outer space. It probably wouldn’t be much good if you were a Secretary of State in Peckham.” I suspect that they might not do you a lot of good if you wore them on a blind date, though maybe they wouldn't hurt much if you had a nice set of wheels and were a hell of a dancer. For his part, Ainsworth says that his own artistry shows in the way he tried to impart "subtle differences" to the Stormtroopers, and in fact, the judge, staring at some of the life-size models that had been brought in to clutter up the courtroom, observed that some of them “looked a bit more cross” than their brothers. Bloch tried to deflect that by saying that wasn't sure just how "a Stormtrooper expresses anger." Maybe not, but if a Stormtrooper could be talked into providing a demonstration, it might be fun to see him use Bloch as his volunteer from the audience.