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| Jon at Jay's wedding |
Today is the 20th wedding anniversary of Dramedy Productions alumnus Jay Chipman. But what made the day TRULY special for Jay two decades ago was that he had a run-in with a certain Dramedy Productions character: a character that he would eventually go on to play in a movie, even though he didn't know it at the time!
At the time of Jay's wedding, we were in the planning stages for our first Star Wars movie, Star Wars: Quest for Vengeance. The main characters in the movie were going to be the same characters that some of us created & played years earlier in Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game by West End Games. We created those characters by picking a character template in the Roleplaying Game book and then giving the character a name. One of us, Jeremy Howard, picked the "Laconic Scout" template and named his character Jon Bon Nebula.
So Jon Bon Nebula was going to be one of the main characters in our Star Wars movie. However, by the time we had decided to make the movie, we had lost touch with Jeremy, so someone else was going to have to play him. Jeremy wouldn't have played him anyway, since he didn't want to participate in the awesome hobby of amateur filmmaking like most of the rest of us did.
The only two things Jeremy contributed to the creation of Bon Nebula was choosing a character template and naming him, so that left a wide open canvas for us to paint the character with. And with a name like Jon Bon Nebula, we figured he'd be a rock star (or jizz-wailer, in Star Wars speak). So we wound up casting Mitch Trotter as Bon Nebula. Mitch was a funny guy in real life, and he was going to play Bon Nebula as a crazy rock star. Since Bon Nebula was supposed to be a "laconic scout," we would just say that he was laconic earlier in his life, but had started to talk more by the time of the movie. 😉
After casting Mitch as Bon Nebula, it was time for Jay's wedding. There were a few Dramedy Productions members in the wedding party besides Jay: Mitch, who was a groomsman; Tracy Walters, who was the usher for the groom; and Brad Blaylock, who was the usher for the bride. While at the wedding, Mitch, Tracy, and Brad signed the wedding guest book. While signing the book, it was decided that Bon Nebula's name should be signed in there, too! So Mitch decided that he would sign the book as Jon Bon Nebula. However, he didn't want Jay & his wife to know that he was the one who did it. He wanted to sign Jon's name far away from his real name, but there was no way to do that without signing it in the middle of nowhere. So he just signed it underneath Brad's name and said that he would disguise his handwriting. 🤣 We never told Jay about the signature, and he never said anything to us about it, either. If he's ever looked at his wedding guest book in the last 20 years, he saw it, and probably thought that it was pretty awesome that Jon Bon Nebula himself signed it. We're not sure how his wife handled it, though! 😄
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| Jon Bon Nebula's signature, written by Mitch Trotter, in Jay Chipman's wedding guest book. Above it is Brad Blaylock's signature, below it is some other dude's signature, and below that dude someone signed some initials, or random letters, or something. (Yeah, we've always been confused by that one.) |
A few months later, we began shooting Quest for Vengeance. On our first day of shooting, Mitch played Darth Vader. At a later date, it was time for him to film one more scene as Vader and to film his scenes as Jon Bon Nebula. However, Mitch wound up dropping off the face of the earth! 🤯 No one could get in touch with him, and we never saw him again. 🤷 So anyway, Tracy Walters wound up finishing the role of Darth Vader. (Which wasn't hard to do, since Vader wears a helmet.) As for recasting Bon Nebula, guess who wound up getting the part? Why, it was Jay Chipman himself! Jon Bon Nebula's name being in Jay's wedding guest book turned out to be a premonition, which means that Jon's signature in his guest book should hold an extra-special place in Jay's heart. 💗
