events have proliferated across the US and the world, the Georgia celebration has retained its reputation as the more raucous, less corporate, party-animal cousin to Hollywood-centric gatherings like the San Diego Comic-Con. It’s still showbiz, but Dragon Con, unlike many of its ilk, continues to be more “show” than “biz.”
At Dragon Con’s 1998 event, Star Wars fans—among whom I enthusiastically count myself—were giddy with anticipation for the arrival of Episode I, which was still nearly nine months away. It wasn’t even The Phantom Menace then because that title had yet to be announced. The possibility that a Star Wars movie could suck seemed unlikely. The prequel trilogy represented hope and possibility. The films were far from becoming the sad punchline that they are now.
As part of the Star Wars generation—I was five, eight, and eleven when the originals played in cinemas—I was so excited for a brand-new era in the space opera franchise that had defined my youth that I decided to capture fans’ anticipation for the prequels in my first documentary film, Millennium’s End: The Fandom Menace. I started shooting in the late summer of 1997—nearly two years before Episode I’s May 1999 release date—and a year into the project, I was preparing for what would be the most intense three days of production.
If geekdom seems fairly tribal to folks on the outside looking in, it’s even more so to those within it. Each genre property of any significance—be it Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, or Lord of the Rings—has its own rabid fan base. The more passionate members of those bases usually stick close to their own tribes. Sure, there’s some border crossing going on because people tend to have multiple interests. However, there was, at least in those days, one universal truth: You were either a Star Wars person or a Star Trek person. You had to choose a side. No exceptions.
Each major property had its own “track” at Dragon Con, and each track got its own conference room in which to schedule events throughout the long weekend. A local group called Matters of the Force managed the Star Wars programming at the convention. The room became my de facto base of operations for the duration of the four-day con. However, that doesn’t mean I didn’t venture out into other areas.
The Trek room was two or three doors down, and I was enticed by the prospect of hanging out behind enemy lines. Okay, it was really the free booze. I experienced a bit of cognitive dissonance because the Trekkies hosting the soiree turned out to be some of the most welcoming, hospitable folks I’d encountered at the Con. Most of them were decked out in full Klingon prosthetics and regalia—I’m not talking cheesy, store-bought Halloween costumes here. We’re talking Hollywood quality, and most of their wardrobe and accoutrements were completely homemade. Some of the Trekkies had spent the better part of a year tailoring their outfits. You’ve got to respect that kind of commitment.
As I entered the room that Rodenberry Built (not really, but it has a nice ring, no?), a greeter handed me a Solo cup full of a curious blue liquid.
“Here, enjoy some Romulan Ale,” he said.
My ambivalence kicked in for a moment. I mean, to a Star Wars fan, sipping such forbidden nectar was akin to drinking the blood of Satan. Okay, maybe that’s a bit extreme. It was more like a member of the Busch family drinking a Coors Light.
It was a pretty inoffensive concoction that alternated between moderately sweet and assertively tart. Perhaps the sour, multi-colored gummy worm sitting at the bottom of the cup enhanced the more pucker-inducing aspects. I still have the video footage of my first sip.
The fact that I’m recalling the experience more than two decades later speaks to the indelible mark the moment left on my psyche.
No, it didn’t make me a Trekkie (okay, Trekker). But it did give me a greater appreciation for passions that weren’t necessarily my own. And it also gave me a bit of a bone to pick with my Star Wars compatriots. They really needed to up their booze game. After all, one of the saga’s most iconic scenes took place in a bar (where Han did, indeed, shoot first!) and the only thematically correct liquid that most disciples of Lucas were drinking circa 1998 was whole milk with blue food coloring. (If that reference is lost on you, go rewatch the scenes at Owen and Beru Lars’s Tattooine moisture farm in Episode IV: A New Hope.)
Thankfully, a great deal has changed. Now there are entire bars that transport guests to a galaxy far, far away and breweries crafting beers like “It’s a Trap IPA” and “That’s No Moon.” It was such developments that made me realize that my two passions—booze and genre nerdery—had evolved in parallel. Craft beer, high-end spirits, and classic cocktails had entered the modern zeitgeist at about the same time that Comic-Cons and all of the pop culture properties in their orbit had moved out of the parents’ basements and into the mainstream. Even better, Doctor Who, the British TV show that shaped my adolescence until it was unceremoniously cancelled by the BBC while I was in high school, was finally being properly resurrected (half-hearted 1996 TV movie notwithstanding) sixteen years after it left screens seemingly forever. By the mid-2000s, the planets were finally aligning.
Being a nerd was suddenly cool. If I jumped into a TARDIS and traveled back to 1984 to reveal that twenty-first-century truth to my twelve-year-old self—well, the little brat would probably steal my TARDIS and leave me stranded in the Reagan era, but you get where I’m going with this.
Around that same time, beer festivals, spirits tastings, and general beverage trade shows started to outnumber sci-fi conventions on my calendar. After screening Millennium’s End at San Diego Comic-Con in 2000, I had something of an open invitation to showcase future projects there. I would screen three more geeky documentaries there, as well as a couple of spoofy, Star Wars-related comedy shorts over the next four years. By then, though, the Hollywood establishment had already begun to descend on Comic-Con and it became impossible to schedule anything if you weren’t employed by a major studio.
The iconic San Diego festival wouldn’t be the last convention at which I’d screen a nerd-themed production. In 2005, I shot a sequel to my first documentary called Galaxy’s End: Revenge of the Myth, revisiting most of the same fans interviewed in the late ’90s and sort of bookending the prequel fan experience. I hadn’t planned it at the time, but when I premiered it at the inaugural New York Comic Con in 2006, it served as a similar bookend to my fandom-related filmmaking. My audiovisual attention had started to turn toward drinks. In 2007, I started kicking around an idea for a script about a bar that transforms itself into a church of beer, when suddenly, the town it is in goes dry. I wrote and tweaked it over the next year and a half, and in the summer of 2009, my filmmaking partner, Lou Tambone, and I shot Beerituality. It premiered a year later.
Since then, I’ve continued to make films of sorts—in the form of mini, documentary-style booze-and-travel videos for my website, DrinkableGlobe.com. But lately, I’ve been spending more time typing at a laptop (too often staring at a blank page) than I have been stressing out behind a camera. Meanwhile, I’ve felt a gentle tug back into the genre geek realm, professionally speaking. (I never left as a fan, just creatively.) It probably began with a piece I wrote on nerdy breweries for All About Beer magazine in 2015. In that article, I observed how craft beer culture and Comic-Con culture went mainstream and became big business simultaneously. A similar revolution in distilled spirits and cocktails started to pick up steam at around the same time. In my mind, this was no coincidence.
And in my mind, this time it felt as if leaving one world didn’t have to happen at the expense of the other. It was like both worlds caught up with each other and now have caught up with me. I hope you enjoy playing in the booze nerd and genre geek sandboxes as much as I do. And you’ll never have to feel like an interloper in either.
Chapter 1
