Looking back at the film that put him on the galactic map, Kyle Newman discusses 2009’s Fanboys, which featured an all-star cast with an incredible future, including Dan Fogler, Jay Baruchel, Sam Huntington, Chris Marquette and Kristen Bell. Kyle looks at how the project got started, how it got Lucasfilm’s approval and became a much-loved fan favorite in the process.
Set in 1998, Fanboys revolves around a group of childhood friends – Windows (Jay Baruchel), Hutch (Dan Fogler), Eric (Sam Huntington), Linus (Chris Marquette) and Zoe (Kristen Bell) – who decide to stolen print of The Phantom Menace from Skywalker Ranch when Linus was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
“We’re going to write them up and hopefully they’ll say yes,” Newman explains. “The script created a lot of buzz around it… It was, in a way, a hot property comedy in the Hollywood system. It was an independent film, but people were aware of it, so people pushed their clients to be in it. For the most part, everyone we went after wanted to do it.”
Notably, the late Carrie Fisher plays a kind-hearted doctor who insists the group bring Linus back home to Ohio. Due to the severity of his illness, he is simply too ill to complete the final leg of the expedition. “We gave her some options for things she could do because she said, ‘I want to do more.’ I don’t want to just be the stick in the mud that prevents him from fulfilling his last wish,” says Newman.