Star Wars archivist and Keeper of the Holocron Leland Chee is featured in the Sacramento Bee.
Ask Leland Chee what he wanted to do when he was younger, and he answers so quickly that you have to ask him a couple of more times to repeat himself.
“Stwrsxprt.”
Sorry?
“StrWsexprt.”
Sorry?
“‘Star Wars’ expert – I wanted to be a ‘Star Wars’ expert when I grew up.”
He says this without a smirk. He is not being cute. He is 46 now, and in the early 1990s, when asked where he pictured himself five years after graduating from the University of California, he “would tell people ‘I will be working for George Lucas. Advising him, likely. While he’s working on films, I’ll be right there, helping out with the story and whatnot.’ I was very much a disciple. George had a disdain for Hollywood, and so I didn’t want to leave Northern California either. Whenever I saw someone wearing a Lucasfilm T-shirt, I knew they were connected to George and so I would ask them how they got their job. And remember, George was semiretired then. But I was a sensible person – even as I said these things, I knew I would never actually get that job. Still, I would have gotten on my knees and bowed to George. That was 30 years ago, and now I know that person.”
Chee is Lucasfilm’s Keeper of the Holocron.
If there is a human with a nerdier job title, we have not heard it.
