Delayed 'Star Wars' Coming of Age Film '5-25-77' Will Be Out This Year ~ Cinenus

Finally. Hopefully. Maybe it will be out this year. Fingers crossed. We've been following this film since the very early days of FirstShowing - originally called just '77, then retitled to 5-25-77, with releases planned for years but nothing actually ever happening. Patrick Read Johnson's 5-25-77 is a coming-of-age indie set around the opening of the original Star Wars on the big screen on May 25th, 1977. Apparently the film is finally being finished, a distributor is place, and it will be out later this year - or so Patrick Read Johnson told Yahoo (via SlashFilm). "I can tell you that the film will come out in theaters on a significant date," he hints, but that won't be on the same day as The Force Awakens in December, so it has to be another time.

"The movie is done," Johnson says. He even returned to his home town of Waukegan, Illinois last month to finishing shooting some pickup shots for the film, stopping by the Genesee Theater where it all began. "When we originally shot the film in 2004, we were so under the gun that we grabbed one exterior shot of my house and that had to suffice," Johnson says. "I really wanted some other angles, not just for variety, but also storytelling purposes" Now he is finishing the final edit, and plans to release the film in theaters and VOD in the near future. He gives us a tease at some of the marketing that will be showing up somewhere:

"I can tell you that the film will come out in theaters on a significant date," he teases, adding that the release date won't conflict with the next official chapter in the Star Wars saga, J.J. Abrams' The Force Awakens, which hits theaters on Dec. 18. "We don't want to be opportunistic, just celebratory," Johnson insists. "We don’t want to take the eyes off the big prize [which is Episode VII.]" He does encourage eagle-eyed Star Wars fans to be on the lookout for some "unconventional advertising" leading up to 5-25-77’s release. "A few months out, you'll start to see some things appearing around the country, and if you've seen the movies these things are referencing — like 2001 and Jaws — you'll know it's advertising before anyone else does."

Not exactly sure what that means, but I'm intrigued to find out. I don't know if the final film will be worth all these years of waiting, but at this point I've been following it so long I've committed at least to seeing it, giving it a shot. And I hope it has some charm to it. Back in 2012 we wrote about the potential release of 5-25-77 that year, but that was just "the cross-country road-trip adventure that begins that day will lead us to one!" A few years ago, Patrick Read Johnson moved to Los Angeles and drove across the country in hopes of finding a distributor and making something of this project. That doc, Hearts of Dorkness, has since been pulled from the web but we expect all of this to be pushed out as part of the marketing sometime this year.

Alienated, hopeful-filmmaker Pat Johnson's (played by John Francis Daley) epic story about growing up in rural Illinois, falling in love, and becoming the first fan of the movie that changed everything. The story in 5-25-77 is about a wannabe filmmaker who gets a tour of Industrial Light & Magic just before the release of Star Wars, then comes home to see it on opening day in 1977. The rest is history, as they say. We ran the first trailer for '77 way back in 2009, it was originally filmed back in 2004, and has been waiting to get an official release ever since. It may finally be the year. Here's to hoping it's worth the wait. Bring on the dorks.

Cinenus

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Wednesday, 10 June 2015