The casual offer came as a surprise to Eller, although he came somewhat qualified to the position having had some prior costuming experience. "I had done a whole bunch of suit work," says Eller. "One friend of mine by the name of William Malone [who went on to direct FearDotCom, an episode of "Masters of Horror", and the remake of House on Haunted Hill] built me into a Day the Earth Stood Still Gort suit he ended up using in a TV pilot he'd shot, so it was no big deal to me. I'd done a lot of other suit work, too. It wasn't like I was off the farm."
Lippincott and producer Gary Kurtz hoped that bringing a flesh-and-blood Vader to 1977's American Booksellers Association Convention in San Francisco might garner some attention from the press at the Ballantine booth, where the second printing of the Star Wars novelization was being promoted.
"They just wanted me to be a living mannequin," recalls Eller. "But I kind of have a perfectionist tendency, and I really wanted to know how to do it right. So I said, 'can I see how this guy moves?'"
With the film not yet in theaters, the only way Eller could study the character's movements was to visit the editing facilities where the finishing touches were being put on the international prints. "So I went over and brought along, without telling anyone, a mono-cassette recorder. I thought I'd record how this guy sounds so I don't sound stupid." Eller was shown a couple of scenes which featured Darth Vader entering the Blockade Runner and then throttling the Rebel officer. He delicately asked if he could record the dialog for reference. "Nowadays, I would have been taken out and shot [for asking that question], but at that time there was no internet, and the movie was coming out in less than a week anyway. So they said, sure, go ahead -- an executive decision made by some guy on a Moviola."
"I recorded a bunch of voice dialog, probably around a dozen lines," continues Eller. "I stayed up half the night in the St. Francis Hotel doing the voice over and over again." Eller can still mimic James Earl Jones' baritone timbre today with alarming accuracy -- for the book show, though, few could appreciate his vocal talents, as the film was still unreleased. His Vader vocalizations, paired with the imposing 6'9" costume, proved extremely effective -- so effective, in fact, that it attracted the attention of some executives visiting from the New York offices of 20th Century Fox.
"They came over and said to Charley, 'you really ought to use this guy again -- this would be really effective in promotion,'" remembers Eller. Lippincott agreed, and called on the Don Post employee a few days after the bookseller convention to do a photo shoot in front of a Hollywood movie theater. Lippincott could see that photo-ops with Vader would be effective in marketing the movie, but also thought he could do one better -- he wanted to take Vader to the people.
