In 2003, Marc Linn read a line in Entertainment Weekly that said no one could make a feature-length Star Wars fan film and actually keep an audience. He saw that as a challenge and immediately began to draft a screenplay. He had no idea that first draft was the beginning of a 23-year production.
The film is called Heart of the Rebellion. It premieres May 4 at 7 p.m. at the Elks Theatre in downtown Rapid City. Admission is free, but there is only one showing. After that, the film gets released episodically on YouTube over the course of about a year. The only way to see Heart of the Rebellion as a complete film is to be at the Elks on May 4. For a film made entirely in the Black Hills by Rapid City filmmakers, there was really only one place it could open.
Marc and his twin brother Michael, co-creator of the film, have been making films together since they got their first camera as kids. Their teenage films won awards on the festival circuit, including Best Narrative at the New York Trinity Film Festival. Both brothers went on to work as news reporters, videographers, and film critics at KOTA before founding Linn Productions.
Their films include the drama Imprint, the faith-based feature Until Forever, and the documentary Rocket Man, made with fellow filmaker and creative collaborator Toby Brusseau. Michael’s short comedy Market 175 screened at the Los Angeles Short Film Festival. Filmmaking has always been a family operation for the Linns. Their younger brother Nick Linn has appeared in many of their productions, and Heart of the Rebellion gives him his first lead role.
On the bigger shoot days he bussed nearly 60 extras out to the Badlands at 6 a.m. Some days it was just Marc with a camera and a boom mic tucked under his arm, calling up an actor or two and heading out to grab a shot or two. Jon Thompson, who plays Thad in the film, was in that mix for the better part of two to three years, and he’ll tell you the worst day on set was still better than the best day at his regular job. He was young, he wanted to act, and every shoot felt like practice. When Marc needed a set built, someone built it. Somebody always knew somebody who could solve the next impossible problem. Nearly 300 people have contributed something to this production over the years.
Some of the locations where they filmed early on are inaccessible now, gated off or privately owned. The technology to render certain effects didn’t exist when they started. They had to wait for the industry to catch up. Jon was 23 when they started shooting. His daughter was born that same year and she is 23 today. He says he’s looking forward to seeing how many familiar faces turn up at the Elks on May 4, people he hasn’t seen in years, some he hasn’t thought about in just as long.
Marc expects that nearly everyone he sees at the Elks on May 4 will have had a hand in this film somewhere along the way. Jon will be in attendance, curious about how much he’ll actually remember once he’s sitting in the dark. He takes his kids to the Elks every chance he gets. It’s his favorite place to give his money to in Rapid City. “As long as Rapid City has the Elks Theatre,” he said, “we will be a gem of the Midwest.”
“Everything that was significant in my life happened while I was filming this film,” Marc said. The hard years are in there. So is the humor. The film they wanted to make in 2003 wasn’t possible in 2003. The effects weren’t there. The experience wasn’t there. It took all of it to get here.
Marc has loved Star Wars since he was small enough that his dad built him a paper mache storm trooper suit for Halloween. On long road trips as a kid he would stare out the back window and pretend the highway lights were TIE Fighters. What fascinated him wasn’t just the world George Lucas built, but how Lucas told a story inside it. The way Return of the Jedi cuts between three battles simultaneously, everyone failing at once, all hope apparently lost, and then somehow it turns.
The anti-Luke is the story he wanted to tell. Where Luke Skywalker grew up sheltered on a farm with little real reason to turn toward darkness, Marc wanted to explorethe narritive of a boy who carried that darkness in him from the beginning, raised by good people but never quite free of what he was born into. When the Empire discovers him, he can no longer stay hidden. Marc wrote the original screenplay, then sat down with Michael and actor Keith Davenport, who plays the lead Jedi, to flesh the story out. Writing inside someone else’s universe comes with rules you can’t break. The arc is already written, and any story set inside that world has to respect where it’s all heading. Marc knew that going in and wrote the ending accordingly, his characters couldn’t simply rise up and win, and he never wanted them to.
Having the Black Hills at his doorstep was one of the biggest inspirations behind the film, and it shows. The variety alone makes it easy to forget you’re in South Dakota. The Badlands stretch out like a desolate moon. The granite ridgelines around Black Elk Peak look like somewhere a Jedi might train. Roughlock Falls could belong to any world in the galaxy, and Marc had the eye to shoot it that way. He grew up here, moved away after high school, and missed the Hills immediately. Getting back was always the goal. Looking at what they captured on screen, it’s hard to imagine this film being made anywhere else.
Michael has composed original music for Linn Productions films for years, and Heart of the Rebellion was always going to need its own sound. The brothers spent entire stretches of production focused on nothing but the score, working toward something that felt like Star Wars without borrowing from it. They wanted the music to be as original as the story.
As for why now, after all these years, Marc said he simply felt it was time. He had been telling people next summer for two decades. He recalled Michael putting it plainly: they owed it to their younger selves. Those two guys in their twenties who thought they could pull this off started something, and it was time to finish it.
Two weeks before the premiere, Marc was still at it, still editing, still finessing, still not quite satisfied. He wasn’t doing it alone. In the final stretch, Marc and Michael have been joined by Tristan Barnard, a fellow filmmaker and longtime collaborator, all of them pulling all nighters to get the edit done.
There were a hundred reasons to walk away and the brothers never took any of them. Marc has said it simply: none of it happens without the people who showed up. Family, friends, cast, crew, and a community that kept saying yes to one man’s crazy idea for twenty-three years.
Some of the locations they filmed at are gone now, gated off or privately owned. The people who made it are older, scattered, some no longer here. The technology they needed didn’t exist when they started, and yet on May the Fourth, at the Elks Theatre in downtown Rapid City, the film Marc Linn saw in his head in 2003 is finally going to be on the screen.
