Sadly, I'm going to miss my invitational screening tonight to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens due to a bad cold. But I feel lucky I was around when the original Star Wars movie was released in May, 1977, and even luckier that I got to work on it. In fact, I feel really lucky to have been born when I was in a period of time in history which experienced an explosion of heightened creativity in cinema, music, and the arts in general. I'm glad the little movie I typed the script for has continued to impact generation after generation in a good way. That impact has certainly been more profound than that of any of the scientific papers I typed for an old boss at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, a job I had before joining Lucasfilm in 1974. I actually wish scientific papers did have some of the same importance as movies and social media personalities do today. We would be a better nation for it. I admired George Lucas for being able to take serious topics and distill them in a way that made them understandable. So, watching a George Lucas Star Wars movie meant you weren't just being entertained, you were actually learning something, even if you were unaware of it. That made working in the Star Wars universe constantly interesting for me over the course of my 35 1/2 year career at Lucasfilm. Knowing that I was doing something that wasn't just entertainment, or money making, but was actually educational was a plus. I'm not too sad I'm missing the new movie, since I can't help but feel how really lucky I was to have been there at the beginning!