Inside the Star Wars Empire Read online

  Inside the Star Wars Empire

  Inside the Star Wars Empire

  A Memoir

  Bill Kimberlin

  An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 2018 Bill Kimberlin

  Lucasfilm, the Lucasfilm logo, STAR WARS and all related characters, names and indicia are trademarks of & copyright © Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved., or their respective trademark and copyright holders.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  ISBN 978-1-4930-3231-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4930-3232-7 (e-book)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  We know the pharaohs well, but not the men who built their tombs.

  —Anonymous

  Contents

  Contents

  Foreword

  The Gilded Cage

  Mrs. Hickman

  The Droid Olympics

  High School Reunion

  What’s It Like?

  Hollywood

  The Cutting Room Floor

  Film School

  “Francis Coppola Wishes to Speak with You”

  Mike Medavoy

  Chan Is Missing

  American Nitro

  The Screamer

  The Players

  What Do You Do?

  The Oracle

  The Smell of Napalm

  Roger Rabbit

  Back to the Future

  Pixar

  A Jolt of Money

  The Mask

  Off the Ground

  Defining Myself

  Jurassic Park

  Schindler’s List

  The Intern

  Acting Out

  Earthquake

  Finding Boonville

  Are You OK?

  Mason’s Distillery

  Kimberlina

  The UFO Detector

  Criminal Behavior

  The China Girl

  The Distraction

  Digital City

  The Stone Age Institute

  Dropping Dead

  About the Author

  Foreword

  I was one of those names on that endless list of credits at the close of blockbuster movies. From Star Wars to Star Trek, Back to the Future to Forrest Gump, Roger Rabbit to Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan to Jurassic Park, from Gangs of New York to others I sometimes forget, I was one of those interminable people thanked as Oscars are collected by dazed winners, clutching that surprisingly heavy gold statue as they try not to leave out anyone that helped them.

  I was an employee at Lucasfilm, and not an especially important one. The supervisors of projects like my boss, Ken Ralston, or Dennis Muren and many others were the stars. I did, however, work at Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) for twenty years, and ran a department for almost a decade.

  This book is not a history of ILM or Lucasfilm, nor is it a biography of George Lucas. It represents my own personal views and experiences from a life in the movie business and is told in a narrative of vignettes that, like a script, sometimes flash either forward or back.

  When I started at Industrial Light and Magic, the receptionist answered the phone saying, “Lucasfilm.” Later that changed, but I refer to them both interchangeably in this book. Also, when I write “we” I mean the company, which may or may not include myself.

  —Bill Kimberlin, California, 2016

  The Gilded Cage

  It is May 1982, Marin County, California. I am in George Lucas’s editing room with a small group of production people sitting around a KEM film editing machine (a viewing device for the physical editing of picture and sound). George is explaining to us what he wants to happen in the space battle sequence of Revenge of the Jedi, the third in the original Star Wars series. I have been hired as the visual effects editor for this space battle.

  The phone rings and we wait patiently. It is Steven Spielberg, and George starts describing how he wants the next Indiana Jones movie to open. “It should be a big Busby Berkeley–type dance number,” he says and then proceeds to describe in detail what is to become the opening to the sequel of the wildly successful Raiders of the Lost Ark. How can he handle all of this at the same time? I’m thinking. We are all under intense pressure to finish this Star Wars sequel, and he is deeply involved in yet another blockbuster.

  A few weeks earlier I had walked into a company of about 120 people called Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), where a lot of very smart people were working. There was, naturally, a lot of competition. You could feel the tension. For some, this would be a launching pad for their careers. This division of Lucasfilm alone would spawn at least two major directors, David Fincher (The Social Network) and Joe Johnston (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids); two major producers, Steve Starkey (Forrest Gump) and Colin Wilson (Avatar); and the creator of Photoshop, John Knoll. There were many others as well. I had survived in the independent film world, but could I survive here?

  There is a term in motion picture production slang for a movie failing at the box office; it’s called “dropping dead.” I had directed one feature film of my own, American Nitro, which had gotten national distribution, and McGraw-Hill had released my documentary on the famous black boxer Jack Johnson (Jeffries-Johnson 1910; more on this later), and I hadn’t dropped dead, at least not yet.

  Here I was, thrust into the center of this movie moguldom, and my head was spinning ever so slightly. That was because the company ethos was to hand people buckets of responsibility and trust them to pull it off. The result for everyone was a perfect act of spine straightening. To paraphrase a famous line from Star Wars: “Do or do not.” At ILM, there was no try.

  At this point in his career, George had made American Graffiti in praise of his generation’s cultural roots in cruising and rock ’n’ roll music. While not an immediate smash hit, it was one of those pictures that just sat in theaters all across the country pumping out cash, week after week. Made for just $750,000—a rounding error in today’s movie production world—it went on to earn $50 million. This picture alone made George and his wife, Marcia Griffin, independently wealthy. This was not supposed to happen: New directors are given a salary and perhaps a small percentage of the net profits of their film. However, the way Hollywood accounting is structured, there are almost never any net profits, no matter how successful the film. Yet this film cost so little, and made such huge profits, that there was no place left to hide them, and it paid off for the director like a slot machine.

  George followed Graffiti with an ode to the old Flash Gordon movie serials that reran on suburban televisions in the 1950s. He called it Star Wars. In fact, he had tried to secure the rights to Flash Gordon at first, but finding them unobtainable, he wrote and directed his own version. While his friend Steven Spielberg had set a high bar with his movie Jaws, Star Wars soon surpassed it in both box office and cultural impact.

  It was these
two movies that changed the Hollywood business model forever. They proved that it was possible to sell just the sizzle. In many ways this was a positive change. The sheer power of the filmmaking itself came to the forefront with rapid editing, roaring soundtracks, and explosive visual effects, and the audience couldn’t get enough of it. It now appeared plausible to adjust the calculus of what could be expected of motion picture entertainment investments. This is not to say that these particular films were not good movies, or even great movies—it was the opportunity to try to mimic their success that changed the dynamic of how Hollywood studios began to operate.

  When asked once why Hollywood doesn’t make good movies anymore, one candid movie producer remarked, “Because good movies are very, very hard to make. There is no formula for a good movie; it is a crap shoot at best.” Hollywood would rather gamble ten times the money on a potential monster film with big stars and boatloads of special effects. Even if the movie isn’t really any good, your odds of returning your investment are much, much higher. If the movie fails the producer is unlikely to be blamed too harshly, because they all would have bet on that same horse.

  The game had changed for George Lucas as well. He had shrewdly bargained with the 20th Century Fox studio to retain the toy rights from the movie for himself, a tradeoff in exchange for a lower salary. Toy rights had been traditionally worthless, and the studio gladly gave most of them up. But there was one more thing George wanted after his most recent spectacular success: He wanted to own his own movies. Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd owned their movies, but that other film genius of the silent era, Buster Keaton, did not and suffered as a result. Michael Jackson had purchased the Beatles song library after Paul McCartney passed on it, and those ownership rights helped him become a billionaire. Ownership was the model George wanted to follow.

  The way for him to do this was to finance his own films from now on. In this way he, not the studio, would control the vast majority of any future profit from the two Star Wars sequels. The studio would receive a mere distribution fee. This act set the die for George and Marcia’s future, but it also risked everything they had worked for. These movies would cost millions and millions of dollars to make.

  By the time I entered the picture, George had made the Star Wars sequel (and arguably the best of the entire series) The Empire Strikes Back and had, with director Stephen Spielberg, cooked up an entirely different homage to old movie serials, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now, with their combined power, Spielberg and Lucas offered a record-breakingly bad deal to the studios vying for the rights to distribute the new Raiders, and the studios eagerly accepted. All of this made for an exciting place to work. Silicon Valley hadn’t really happened yet, and this felt like the center of the universe for anyone interested in motion pictures.

  The ILM movie compound, where I worked, was spread out over several acres with different departments located in a cluster of industrial buildings. I always thought the name Industrial Light and Magic came from the real estate itself. When searching for a location where the messy end of filmmaking could take place (we blew things up), George must have encountered the term “light industrial,” which is exactly how this area (and the original location in L.A.) would be described on the local county zoning maps. All he had to do was add the “magic.” In any case, this was the industrial district, and you could pretty much do what you liked. If you needed to blow up a Star Destroyer, in all its wide-screen glory, this was the place to do it.

  At about this time, George had decided to consolidate all of his filmmaking divisions into what would become Skywalker Ranch, a 5,000-acre movie ranch, at an eventual cost of at least $100 million. This ranch was in an isolated valley about a twenty-five-minute drive from ILM. It would include a $3.5 million recreational building for his employees with an Olympic-size swimming pool, indoor handball courts, and a restaurant. Across a lake from that complex would be a huge technical building with a sound stage large enough to record a hundred-piece symphony orchestra, multiple editing and sound mixing rooms, and a giant movie theater.

  Somewhat removed from all of this would be George’s office, a 50,000-square-foot building that looked like a Victorian hotel. This building would have an even larger restaurant with two dining rooms and a magnificent two-story library crowned with a stained glass dome. The artist who created all this stained glass would eventually break up George’s marriage and run off with his wife, Marcia.

  However, all of this was a long way, in both time and distance, from where I sat pondering my new life in this Marin industrial district. What we did here was far too offensive in dirt, dust, and noise; we were quarantined so as not to infect the moviemaking Shangri-la that George was building. We would be free to visit the Ranch whenever we wanted, and I would often take friends or family there for lunch and they would all be astonished. But in time the Ranch, while beautiful, began to seem very isolating. It was so far out of town that you couldn’t reach any other lunch places in the time you had available. So essentially, no one could leave. For many of those who worked there, it came to represent a gilded cage, and we who worked in the real world eventually began to become cynical about the Ranch’s splendor.

  Those of us at ILM were the barnacled hull, and the Ranch was the part that stuck out of the water. Beautiful Lake Ewok, we renamed “Butthead Lake” among ourselves. Some of us even started calling the whole operation “Lucasland.” But not yet. That was to come. Those early years still remain amazing to me—magical almost.

  Decades later I would come across F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Hollywood.

  Under the moon the back lot was thirty acres of fairyland, not because the locations really looked like African jungles and French chateaux and schooners at anchor and Broadway at night, but because they looked like the torn picture books of childhood, like fragments of stories dancing in an open fire.

  His description was something like what I would experience. I would be introduced to fragments of fantasy, stored in the real world and this is something hard to forget.

  Mrs. Hickman

  My first few weeks were a blur of the new, and I had to get used to the ILM system. I worked as an editor in Special Visual Effects. It was our job to layer up shots, like making Dagwood sandwiches. Backgrounds, star fields, spaceships, monsters, explosions, actors—whatever the script called for. We worked off guides called storyboards. These were drawings showing the contents of the scene and the action expected. Every department had walls lined with hundreds of these cartoonlike visuals. Each one had a sequence title, like “Space Battle,” and a scene number. Every day thousands of feet of motion picture film would arrive, either from the six large shooting stages at Elstree Studios in Great Britain, where the full-size Millennium Falcon was parked, or from any of the other more exotic locations around the world.

  For the special effects shots we didn’t use ordinary movie film—we used the huge images produced by an all-but-dead Hollywood format called VistaVision. Each frame was four times the size of a regular movie film frame, which gave us a tremendous advantage in retaining quality in the extensive duplicative processes we used to create the impossible.

  During the years when television was threatening to take away the Hollywood moviegoing audience, all the major studios fought back with something that television could not compete with: wide-screen formats such as Cinerama and VistaVision. George rounded up the old cameras and projectors so he could shoot, project, and edit VistaVision right alongside the standard cameras.

  George differed from the rest of Hollywood in that he not only made movies, but also wanted to advance the technology. Hollywood wasn’t interested in investing in better equipment and methods. Their attitude was that if someone came up with something useful, they would just buy it. George, on the other hand, was developing a completely new electronic editing system and a better sound system for theaters, and was taking the early steps toward digital cinema.

 
; We worked ten-hour days and fifty-hour weeks. These were all union jobs except for the executives, producers, and clerical staff. That meant you were paid a minimum of at least ten hours a week of overtime beyond your normal salary. Unlike the current high-tech world, we got paid for our endless hours. As the number of calendar days to the movie’s release shrank, we would begin working six days a week and then seven, clocking dozens of hours of overtime and sometimes even double time. Also, at least in the early days, every worker’s family shared in all the special Saturday screenings of the films we worked on and all of the gifts and lavish holiday parties, as well as the organic Thanksgiving turkeys that were handed out each year by the truckload.

  Perhaps more than any of this was just the feeling that you belonged to something, something the world thought important. When one of the chief model makers got sick after flying to England with a bad cold that infected his brain, we got bulletins on his condition every morning before dailies, until it was announced that George showed up at the hospital and was “on the case.” It was as if one were now part of a wealthy family—a third cousin at best, but still a part.

  We laughed on seeing any new executive arrive all dressed in a suit and tie. That never lasted long. The poor guy would look around, see George Lucas in a flannel shirt and jeans, and quickly decide he was overdressed. Also, the executives were a little afraid of us. We knew how to make movies and they didn’t. Their jobs depended on how well we did ours. We called them the “green carpet boys,” as the front office was the only place in our building that had any carpet. My building, Building D, was basically a warehouse with tilt-up walls and roll-up doors that had been severely modified over the years to accommodate our needs.

  Everything we did was done in secret. It had to be. The world at that time was crawling with Star Wars fans. Our buildings had no signs that would indicate who we were or what we were doing. The front door had lettering that said “The Kerner Company. Optical Research Lab.” We left the sign as a kind of puzzle. We were located on Kerner Boulevard and we used optical printers for compositing our effects shots. Since one of our printers had been used to open the Red Sea in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, we thought of ourselves as just researching better ways to perform miracles.