Elstree 1976 is a feature-length documentary looking at the lives of the people behind the masks and beneath the helmets in the original Star Wars movie. Over the summer of 1976, a wide array of North American and British actors, along with an inexhaustible supply of film extras, donned crazy costumes and headgear to populate George Lucas's universe. Few of them understood what the film even was, let alone the impact it would go on to have culturally on a global basis. Filmmaker Jon Spira has tracked a cross section of these people down and explored the bizarre community they have formed, to find out what it means to exist in the shadow of such a phenomenon.