If you have been in the Star Wars online community for some time now, you probably remember the Bothan Spy. For the uninitiated, the Bothan Spy is the one that e-mailed usually-accurate tips about Episode I while it was shooting at Leavesden a year or two ago. If his identity was ever revealed, I certainly missed it. Perhaps you have also heard of the Millenium Spy, who created a website called the "Leavesden Report" that I haven't checked up on for a few months now. There's "Delta Source," who kind of mysteriously disappeared, and left without a trace.

Now, I don't really have any knowledge of the studio espionage business on the whole, but I remember that one of TF.N's informants said that you turn off the flash on the camera and jump over the fence. Personally, I don't buy this story, but that's just my opinion. All that has been confirmed is that these spies take spiffy photos of the set and then send them to websites, e-mailing them info on anything in the picture that could possibly be unclear.

From what I remember, some of the claims made by the spies were accurate, while others were way off; and some were absolutely unconfirmable and sometimes outrageous, like when Harry from AICN reported that he read the first few pages to the script. In fact, to further extend my point, I'll flashback to some old news from TF.N's archives:

6/10/98: MORE ADO ABOUT AN EPISODE 1 TRAILER

Tinman, 10:20am PDT

Reader "Cottman" wrote in with some interesting news. Can't confirm or deny it though.

"A guy at work told me that he was talking to someone that works at one of the movie theaters in town and he said that they are not 100% sure that the trailer was going to be on the X-Files, but that they had a talk with a distributor or something and were told that they won't find out until they receive the film on the 18th."

Cottman's friend also said that "theaters should be prepared for 1/3 of the people either going to The X-Files or the theater in general (not sure) to be there for the Prequel Trailer."

-- courtesy TheForce.net

I'm almost embarrased to say that I did go see the opening night show of the X-Files movie to capture the trailer. Boy, was I mistaken... there is certainly a big difference between June 19 and November 20. There was, in fact, quite a lot of trailer hype back in June because some Fox executive was misquoted. Quite funny, now that I think about it.

Scrolling further down, we see reports of the release date of May 25 being pushed back until Christmas; never mind that the release date ended up to be May 21. Past the articles about Fox paying big bucks for the license, and a whole gaggle of title rumours, we arrive in June of 1997, at this article:

6/13/97: TITLE SPECULATION FROM TRUEFAN

The following report comes from Prequel Watch and their reliable source TrueFan:

"Expect to look for the official title for Ep. 1 to be announced sometime in July if not sooner."

-- courtesy TheForce.net

Ahem... obviously wrong... by over a year and three months, in fact. September 25 was when the title was announced.

Now, this is not to say that the spies are unreliable. In fact, we owe most of our information about the prequels to them. Names like Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson's character) and Jar Jar Binks (Ahmed Best's character) were only confirmed for the first time in this month's issue of Vanity Fair, although they were rumoured since 1997. Here's something from March of 1998 that is strikingly accurate, from the Bothan Spy himself:

"I can confirm that C-3PO is rebuilt by Anakin after finding him in a junk heap and the actor inside the costume just had rods of metal sewn on top of a black undersuit, which they'll take out later. The rumors about See-Through-PO are mistaken and actually refer to the fact that C-3PO has most of his gold plates missing when Anakin finds him!"

This was confirmed by the trailer, when we saw C-3PO as a bunch of wires. I'd have to say that looked like computer graphics work, though...