A preview cut of this film was shown at "Star Wars Celebration IV" in Los Angeles. Appropriately enough, it was shown on 5-25-2007, the 30th anniversary of the premiere of Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977). After ten more years of additional work on the film, the nearly final cut, of the work-in-progress, was test-screened, in 32 theaters, on 5-25-17, the 40th anniversary of the original release of Star Wars. The finished film is scheduled for worldwide release, beginning in late summer, 2021.
Writer/director Patrick Read Johnson was in reality the first person to be shown an incomplete preview screening of Star Wars: A New Hope outside of those who worked on the movie. This film is his autobiographical telling of how that came to happen.
Filming spanned twelve years, with primary photography from 2004 to 2006, and additional photography in 2015 and 2016.
Partially filmed at Waukegan High School in Waukegan, IL
At the film's start, Pat Johnson (John Francis Daley) is wearing a T-shirt with the words, "Watch The Skies" on it. The phrase can be connected to about half a dozen science fiction references, but the only one not anachronistic with 1977 would be the film "The Thing from Another World" (1951), the first (loose) film adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.'s original short story/novella/novel (it can be found in all three forms). In the horror film, after "good" has finally triumphed over "evil," and the weather allows radio communication, one of the principals, a newspaperman named Ned "Scotty" Scott, begins to broadcast his account of the events, a story he introduces with: "And now before giving you the details of the battle, I bring you a warning: Every one of you listening to my voice, tell the world, tell this to everybody wherever they are. Watch the skies. Everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies."