Inside the Star Wars Empire Read online

  By 1987 home video sales were the major profit generator for the studios. I first noticed this when all of our ILM clients from Steven Spielberg on suddenly changed their movie release standard from wide-screen Panavision back to the historic almost square, television-screen-friendly format of the past. What was going on?

  I found out when we decided to rerelease our movie on VHS tape, now that we had gotten the rights back. We signed up for a booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center during a big home-video dealers convention. It was a madhouse. The “booth” alone for the video release of the movie Platoon reportedly cost $1 million to build. We had a card table. People were placing huge orders for video titles to rent in video stores all over the world. Even the porn distributors where there, having left their Learjets at the Las Vegas airport. They were selling porn tapes for $100 each, cash only, and the line of buyers stretched across the auditorium.

  This convention demonstrated why major movies were now released in standard format. Widescreen was too expensive and difficult to transfer to home video, and the distribution money was now largely in renting and selling tapes. We took orders like everyone else and sold some tapes, but we didn’t have a national ad campaign to help sell our movie and we would never again sign up with a distributor—it’s too hard to get paid. We were a little early for what I wanted to do, but that would come with the rise of the Internet, YouTube, Facebook, and PayPal.

  Right now my job was still at Lucasland, but I didn’t want to see myself totally swallowed up in it any more. My goal had always been to work somewhere in the movie business to make a living, but to also have my own outside projects. Getting the distribution rights for Nitro back helped me retain and expand my own creative interests once again.

  Artist’s apology drawing left on my desk. Author’s Collection

  Building D screening room with me just to the right behind George Lucas. Author’s Collection

  My childhood next-door neighbor, Bessie Barriscale (Mrs. Hickman). Author’s Collection

  Me with E.T., the subject of a small film that surprised us all except for our receptionist. Author’s Collection

  Posing with famous actors in the ILM model shop. Author’s Collection

  At my ILM editing bench beneath one of those Zoetrope photos that seemed to follow me around the movie business. Author’s Collection

  Me filming entirely too close to nitro-burning dragsters. Author’s Collection

  Squishing Bob Hoskins for Roger Rabbit was easy. Making it look funny was the hard part. Author’s Collection

  Directing the great Slim Pickens in a TV spot. Author’s Collection

  Our family home in San Francisco as it looked in 1916 before my father bought it. Author’s Collection

  Our ILM front office display sometime in the 1990s. Author’s Collection

  Snapshot of George’s office at the Ranch. Author’s Collection

  ILM lobby mannequin of Darth Maul. Author’s Collection

  My favorite spot at ILM, the model shop. Author’s Collection

  Jedi film credits. My name in that endless list. Author’s Collection

  “Jungle Jim” car and fan from American Nitro. Photo Credit: Beverly Connor; Author’s Collection

  Original ILM door disguised as The Kerner Company. It now hangs on the wall of the new ILM in the San Francisco Presidio. Photo Credit: Jeff Doran; Author’s Collection

  Reminder to cameramen posted on the wall in our VistaVision line-up room at ILM. Note graffiti by camera assistants. Author’s Collection

  I’m lining up space ships for a shot in Jedi. Note the black-and-white strips I’m bipacking together. These were quick camera tests identical to the color film shot for the movie. Just easier to work with on many element shots. Author’s Collection

  The Ranch main house as seen from Lake Ewok. My first year, only part of the foundation had been built and we asked George what it was going to be. He responded, “That will be my office.” Author’s Collection

  My meeting with Francis Coppola at the Zoetrope Studios in San Francisco. This was pre-Godfather and he is offering his help. Author’s Collection

  A note from my boss Ken Ralston. This is how we dealt with the pressure, we joked about it. Author’s Collection

  Our film American Nitro opened against some stiff competition, but we survived. Author’s Collection

  We showed our movie to artist Larry Duke and this is what he came up with. Just the outrageous tone we wanted and the hint there might be something more to this movie. Author’s Collection

  My instruction sheet for building Jedi Space Battle shot #19 (SB19). Note that the first five ships I used were from another shot. Author’s Collection

  One of my many employee gifts from Lucasfilm, this one showing the original name of Return of the Jedi. Author’s Collection

  My friend Phil the barber. You never know who will walk into Phil’s shop. I spent a week flying around on Gordon Getty’s private airliner because of Phil. Author’s Collection

  This is how we plotted out Jedi Space Battle shots on the big VistaVision editing machines. We made a mask representing the Panavision cutoff and piled cells with outlines of every ship in the shot at every frame where they moved significantly. It could get confusing especially when you were in a hurry, which was always. Author’s Collection

  This is in the C theater. We had a kind of totem tower listing the films we had worked on and any Oscars won. R2 stood guard. Author’s Collection

  Saved Newsweek cover story from our pre–Radio City Music Hall screening dinner where the producers grabbed it out of my hands in a frenzy. Notice the sweaty hand smears over Roger’s head and the “Who is . . .” title. That’s producer flop-sweat fears. Author’s Collection

  This hung in the ILM line-up room where we built up shots for Jedi. This is how we maintained consistency between Star Wars films. Primitive, but effective. Author’s Collection

  We all got to pick an original hand-painted cell from Roger Rabbit. I chose the scene where Eddie Valiant tells Roger how his brother was killed by a Toon. Shows how painted animation synced with live action. Author’s Collection

  When the movie first came out I bought this Roger doll in its original box. Author’s Collection

  What we called a crossover sheet, my instructions for optically printing ships in front of the Death Star in Jedi Space Battle Shot #19 (cover photo). SB19 had so many elements that I had to tape four regular ones together. The small X’s represent to the printer where I want one ship to pass in front of another. Author’s Collection

  Working camera on my friend Rick Schmidt’s film in Death Valley. The actress holding an Oscar in extreme close-up says, “I would like to thank the Academy . . .” and we pull out to reveal where she came from. Author’s Collection

  We had this relative size chart posted on our wall in Roger Rabbit effects editorial. I’m smiling just looking at it. Author’s Collection

  The rest of a long, long chart. Author’s Collection

  Caught some stage crew moving a Storm Trooper across the studio lot. One seemed to think I was the Paparazzi. Author’s Collection

  Technical building, Skywalker Ranch. George designed the Ranch along a storyline. What if an old farmer suddenly got rich and converted a winery building to another purpose? It has bricked-up windows, as if it had been repurposed and not built new. Author’s Collection

  Titanic model we built for Ghostbusters. Author’s Collection

  The Pit. Spaz’s ILM lair deep under C theater. L to R Mark Dippe, Dennis Muren, Eric Armstrong, Steve “Spaz” Williams. Note foreground T-Rex model. Photo Credit: © Industrial Light & Magic. All Rights Reserved.

  The Screamer

  At ILM we studied images all day, sitting in d
arkened screening rooms watching special effects shots over and over looking for flaws, looking for more ways to fool the eye into seeing what we wanted people to see. Our movie projectors had been modified so we could run our film at any speed and also run in reverse. The projection booths could be filled with racks of film rollers so we could loop any shot we wanted to study. And study we did, endlessly. Beyond this we would have the shots flopped left–right and watch them from this new perspective, trying to refresh our brains to see things anew, always seeking clues as to what we could add that might sell the shot as real.

  When I first started working at ILM, I just sat there and listened to the others’ comments, but over time I began to see things myself. It was all about perspective: light and shadow, balance and redirection. We wanted to take temporary control of the viewer’s brain and convince him or her that we were telling the truth, when we obviously were lying. We were offering visual proof to support our lies and we almost always won because we had a coconspirator—the audience. They always want to suspend their disbelief; they love being fooled and scared, being pushed to the edge and then surprised and relieved when we pull them back. So we got really good at that. Soon my eye doctor was asking, “What the hell do you do for a living? Your eye tests are off the charts!”

  But we couldn’t fool everyone. George had moved his company away from Hollywood, but we still had to work with them. The idea was to work on other directors’ movies in between movies that George wanted to make. In this way a large staff of talented people could be kept together until another Lucas production came along. Otherwise, all the talent would have to be laid off and it would disperse back to Los Angeles, where the majority of the movie industry was located. So we went to work for Hollywood.

  I used to say that working for Lucasfilm was like a Boy Scout camp compared to Hollywood or New York filmmaking, and I didn’t know how our people were going to mix with them. We were soon to find out.

  On Die Hard 2 (1990), we were supposed to do some plane crash shots. We got to bid on the job through the wooing of the producer, Joel Silver, by our sales staff. Now, the first thing you have to know about Silver is that he is one of the most important producers in Hollywood. He produced the Die Hard pictures and the Lethal Weapon pictures, as well as 48 Hrs., The Matrix, and scores of others. His pictures have made the studios billions of dollars in ticket sales. The Hollywood Reporter devoted an entire issue to saluting him, and practically the whole industry took out vanity ads saying how much they all liked and admired him. The second thing you have to know is that Joel is a screamer. If he doesn’t get his way, he will throw a red-faced, vein-bulging tantrum.

  I discovered that Joel was a lot younger than I anticipated when he came by Industrial Light and Magic, where our general manager and publicity people had arranged a special screening for him. He was actually an interesting character who collected major artworks and Frank Lloyd Wright houses. He would buy and restore the Wright houses at great expense and then keep them as residences for himself.

  On this day we were going to show Joel the forest fire footage that we had shot for Steven Spielberg’s film Always, which starred Richard Dreyfuss (who for some reason people occasionally mistake me for), John Goodman, and Holly Hunter. We had just finished our work on this picture and we had an impressive reel of major fire effects to show him. Our crews had rented a giant old car-assembly plant near Point Richmond, not far from our studio. Tons of live trees that looked real but were actually about one-quarter scale in size were brought into this massive industrial building and set ablaze.

  The setup had a giant firefighting-type aircraft that our model shop had built on a gantry simulating flight over a raging forest fire. When edited together into a sequence with close-ups of the actors in simulated—but full-size—cockpits, this footage made a very exciting and realistic forest fire fight.

  Just as we were about to roll the film for Mr. Silver to demonstrate what great work we could do for him, he turned around in his seat and said to the group, “The fire sequence in my film is being done by a friend of mine, who happens to be in the effects business. I will look at your reel, but just to be clear, I don’t fuck my friends.”

  I am not sure, but I don’t think many people in that room had ever seen this reel. They had seen the movie, of course, but this was different. It wasn’t just the short, quick cuts that had been selected to cut into the movie—this was an all-out, nonstop, traveling shot of a large plane set against a wildly exploding backdrop of a massive forest in full blaze. It was impressive.

  When the lights came up, Joel was excited. He told us that this was the greatest fire effects reel he had ever seen and we were soon awarded the work. So much for friendship in Hollywood. Joel, however, was not done with us yet. When you sign on with this guy, you are along for a wild ride.

  We went down to the 20th Century Fox studio to meet with Joel and his director for Die Hard 2, Renny Harlin. We went to the air terminal set and then to Joel’s office, which was in one of those old-style bungalows that only the biggest of Hollywood stars used to rate. Here we showed the director and producer some actual FAA airplane crash tests. These were a reference for discussing our special effects shots for the movie. Everyone was impressed with the video, and the rate of speed for shooting our miniatures was discussed.

  There was a problem. The director, after learning that we planned to cover the shots with only three high-speed cameras, suggested we use more. At that point our visual effects supervisor, Mike McAlister, who was responsible for shooting all of this, explained that this would not only increase costs, but there were not that many of this special type of camera available.

  Joel walked in and out of our meeting room taking phone calls all through the discussion. We were in a white, wood-frame building that had originally been built for Frank Sinatra. This fact alone attested to Joel’s importance to the studio. The bungalow was paneled in wood but very sparsely furnished. His modern art was displayed. Big ceramic cars, classic movie posters, and toys with movie themes were scattered about. It was all very informal, more like an artist’s studio than a production office. Joel was famous for saying, “I’m not in this business to make art; I’m in it to make money to buy art.”

  The budget came up. Joel said he had just talked to the studio and they wouldn’t approve more than a certain figure. The ILM producer for this project was Chrissie England. She had started at Lucasfilm in 1977 as a receptionist, and by 1978 was George Lucas’s secretary. She was one of the oldest employees, and it was rumored that George had granted her a job for life. Whatever the case, she was quite attractive and knew how to deal with powerful men. Chrissie mentioned that additional shots would cost about $300,000 more.

  Joel started to talk, but I could see that something very strange was happening to him right before our eyes. It was as if we were seeing Dr. Jekyll slowly transforming into the monster, Mr. Hyde. He was working up a ferocious anger. First he talked loud. Then he swore a little bit. He used this to feed adrenaline into his system. He built up this yelling until he was screaming. When he screamed, he would look up at the ceiling and his neck was bulging like the Hulk. He kept saying not to bring up “MORE COSTS.” He did not want to hear that there would be “MORE COSTS.” This tirade built to a crescendo that instructed us to “NEVER MENTION IT TO HIM AGAIN.” We were no longer in Marin County.

  During this screaming tirade I was dying to stand up and say, “I have to go to the toilet.” But I couldn’t do it. It might have cost me my job, and this guy wasn’t worth it. I knew how to deal with him; I had seen this before in New York when confronted with a similar situation. If you start to laugh at this type of guy, the air escapes them and they fold like a punctured ball. But it wasn’t my choice; I was part of a team.

  Chrissie said that some things could be cut. Mike said that he would never add anything unnecessarily. Joel, point made, became normal and left the room. But he only stopped jus
t outside the door and sent for Renny, the director, who had said nothing during the outburst but must have been in shock to find that his requests were in jeopardy.

  Safely outside, the director undoubtedly received assurances that this was just business and not to worry, you will have everything you need. In Hollywood, directors, writers, actors, and some others are universally referred to as “talent.” They are a special class, a special breed, and they are given the widest latitude possible, especially when they are in the middle of a costly production.

  When we left, Mike stopped the director and said, “What do you want me to do? I work for you. But after this, I’m not going to add anything.” After a long pause, the director said, “This is a process we have to go through [meaning the screaming fits about money]. It will eventually work itself all out.”