As Rehm now tells Lucasfilm.com, his first professional visit to Celebration actually came before his hiring at Lucasfilm. Back in 2019, he was working for Premiere Displays, “an experiential marketing company and fabrication house,” as he explains. “We would do booth builds for any clients at trade shows or conventions. One of the big clients was Electronic Arts. They were doing Celebration Chicago to promote a mobile game, Galaxy of Heroes. So that was my first Celebration. It’s interesting now to understand the other side. I had just one booth to focus on.”
Rehm’s professional journey might seem like a well-planned, predetermined route to his current Lucasfilm position, each role providing another essential skill or bit of experience. But it all happened organically as he refined his career goals. “Going through my career in events, I wanted to be very intentional in terms of next steps and now how those could apply to being an event manager in some capacity,” he says. “I didn’t know that this was the position I was training for, but in hindsight it makes great sense.”
Rehm’s first step was in music. “I was actually a Music Management major at the University of the Pacific,” he explains. “I played the alto sax and music was always in the family, so I did marching band and jazz band and all of that. I was trying to stick with the arts, but I never thought I would be a professional saxophone player. That was not my aspiration. But I loved that world of entertainment in general, which is why I looked at the music business side.”
Out of college, Rehm found a position in the Disneyland Resort’s guest talent program. Throughout a given year, dozens of choirs, bands, dance groups and related workshops visit the resort to perform. For Rehm, supporting those efforts “made perfect sense,” as he puts it. “I knew those things. Artists gravitate towards other artists. You can speak the language, if you will. With that, I broadened out, and worked with events, such as anytime we had guest talent, like a military band for the Fourth of July or a filming where they needed a children’s choir. We even did the races, like the Star Wars Half Marathon, and we cast the 501st Legion for that.”
In addition to guest talent, Rehm worked with Disneyland’s atmosphere talent, musical groups that perform regularly around the park. After about six years at the resort, Rehm took the job at Premiere Displays, where he had his first introduction to Star Wars Celebration in 2019 in addition to countless other conventions and tradeshows. His first impressions of Celebration were an exercise in contrast. “I just thought it was fascinating to have everything be Star Wars,” he recalls. “Working at Comic-Con, it’s this melting pot of pop-culture. It can be anything. The who’s who comes out for it, and I don’t even necessarily know who or what that is. Then to enter Celebration, I know and love Star Wars, and all the people who are there love it. It’s this community, a family of people who made it a priority to come.”
Though Rehm valued his experience with Premiere Displays and enjoyed the travel, he also was newly married and looking to stay closer to home. “So I became senior manager of events at the Ontario Convention Center,” he explains. “Again, it’s the same world, but rather than being the client coming into the center, I was helping operate the actual center as a home base. After about a year, the Lucasfilm role opened up. How could I not apply? I had a love for events and for Star Wars and this world.”