The choice is yours: Join those camping out in front of the megaplexes in anticipation of getting tickets to Star Wars: The Force Awakens or try to win passes from a San Clemente substance abuse treatment center.
449 Recovery is offering 10 tickets to the J.J. Abrams joint via this special URL landing page: info.449recovery.org/star-wars-event/.
Winners will join 449 Recovery staff and clients at a Hollywood-style, red carpet event where the encouraged dress is either formal or a Star Wars appropriate costume. Ticket pick up—with valid picture I.D.—begins at 6:15 p.m. outside Krikorian San Clemente Cinema 6, 641 Camino de Los Mares, San Clemente. Festivities start at 6:30 p.m. and the film rolls a half hour later.
Also getting an even early look, albeit at a different Orange County theater, are Jason Carson, his sister Natasha Scrivener and their family and friends. The siblings purchased all 559 seats of the Hollywood Theater at the Irvine Spectrum 21 for Thursday's 7 p.m. showing, although their festivities begin there at 5:15.
Scrivener says they will have swag bags, a Hollywood-style backdrop for picture taking with Darth Vader, a Jedi, a Stormtrooper, Princess Leia and Chewbacca, and a 30 minute pre-show inside the theater with raffles and a costume contest. Oh yes, you must be in costume. “A Star Wars T-shirt and light saber will NOT work,” Scrivener says. “That is NOT a costume. You need to GO ALL OUT! If you are not wearing a costume … don’t even bother to come. We are serious.”
The excitement around the first Star Wars movie at Big Newport in 1977, when she was 7, spurred Scrivener and Carson to put on this event for a new generation. “My brother Jason remembers this as one of the greatest events of all time,” she says.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.