Inside the Star Wars Empire Read online

  We outfitted our crews with signs and T-shirts that had phony film names on them, like Blue Harvest, for our location shoots. People always ask what movie you are shooting, and since we couldn’t say Star Wars, we came prepared with cover names, and that seemed to satisfy them.

  Still, people showed up, having driven clear across the country just for a glimpse of anything related to their passion for the movies we made. One fan even entered our reception area and inquired suspiciously about the sign on our door, “What do you actually do here?” To which our resident former Marine replied, “We manufacture and test rectal thermometers.”

  They would go through the garbage and climb over the fences. To me it was living proof of the power that motion pictures have over people. It could be annoying, but it was also thrilling to watch all the madness.

  One Saturday, things were kind of slow around the studio, so when I saw an outside telephone repair guy had brought his kids with him, I decided to have some fun. “Would you guys like to see Darth Vader?” Their dad said it was OK, so I took them over to the model shop, which had a fully costumed seven-foot-tall Darth Vader on a hidden mannequin. Also, R2-D2 and C-3PO were there. This was long before any commercial mock-ups of these characters were out in the real world. They were getting the “A” tour that hordes of movie fans only dreamed about. They were impressed, but I could tell that they were also slightly disappointed. The thrill we seek comes in darkened movie theaters. Without the lighting and music, without James Earl Jones’s thundering Darth Vader voice, it was just an empty suit. This was an important lesson for me to learn, and there would be many more in the years to come.

  It was George’s birthday on the week I started. We were all in Building D’s screening room watching what in filmmaking are called “dailies”—the raw, unedited footage that comes back from the lab every morning. George would sit in the center flanked by his key supervisors and his art director, Joe Johnston (now a major director). I would sit just behind his right shoulder to hear his instructions. Someone took detailed notes of everything we said as we viewed the footage. These notes, called the “Daily Report,” were published and distributed to everyone an hour or so after the screening ended.

  As we sat watching miles of VistaVision footage for what would eventually become the “Bike Chase” in Jedi, several Ewoks suddenly entered screen right holding a huge banner that said “Happy Birthday George.” It got a big laugh and George kept saying, “Make sure that is in tonight’s dailies at my house so Marcia can see it.” George’s wife Marcia was every bit a full partner in both the moviemaking and the empire-building. She was a first-rate film editor in her own right, having cut Taxi Driver, the seminal 1976 film directed by Martin Scorsese. In fact, I once saw her fashion an emotional scene out of some almost-scrap footage of two Ewoks talking. When she gave her opinion, people listened.

  There was a small restaurant, more of a coffee shop really, close to my building, and some of us would walk over there after dailies in search of a donut or bagel. On about my second day on the job, I’m sitting there when George walks in, grabs a Styrofoam cup, and starts pouring himself some coffee. I remember thinking, doesn’t this guy have anyone to go get coffee for him? But that wasn’t it. He just wanted to lead a normal life like everyone else. I remember being with him in the screening room the morning that ET had surpassed Star Wars as the all-time box office champ. Someone asked him about it and he said, “Good, now maybe they will leave me alone.”

  Even though he had become wealthy and famous, and was becoming more powerful with every new film, George remained uncomfortable around people he didn’t know. My friend Tim, who was a gentle soul, also worked for ILM and he told me that he walked up to George in the hallway once and stuck his hand out, saying something like, “Hello, Mr. Lucas, I’ve worked for you for over two years and I still haven’t met you.” Tim said that George almost leaped backwards in shock. Awkward moment. Even the elaborate Christmas parties were always slightly awkward, because they seemed to have no host. A simple “Thanks for coming” from George would have done the trick, but that never happened.

  What George may have lacked in social skills, however, he more than made up for in his ability to make decisions on the spot, sometimes with millions of dollars at stake. Whenever George was around, the whole movie had a direction and could move forward, but when he was off in England or somewhere, the decisions would pile up. Should we tear that set down? We need the space for the next setup. Are we done? Does the cutting room have enough to work with? I remember him returning to our screening room after a couple of weeks’ absence. There had been a lot of hand-wringing by producers because we were getting behind schedule. This was explained to him and he said, “You want decisions? Bring the lights down and roll the film, I’ll give you decisions.”

  Believe me, not all directors can do that. Some are almost paralyzed with indecision. On The Hunt for Red October, ILM had picked up the underwater submarine work after some other effects company ran out of ideas on how to make it work. We were going over the deep-ocean sub tests we had faked with smoke and miniatures when the director, John McTiernan, starts into a speech about how “there is actually no light at all down at this depth, you know.” Good lord, I thought, you’ve been on this movie a year now and you’re still talking about that? Hey, guess what, there is no sound in space either. What do you want us to do, withdraw Star Wars from distribution? It’s called suspension of disbelief. It is the anchor of all theatrical drama. No wonder you are behind. Let’s get on with it. Of course, I kept my mouth shut.

  I always felt that directors that came to ILM for their effects work were like kids being handed the keys to a Ferrari. Some could handle it and we made them rich. Others couldn’t handle it and they ran off the road, crashed, and burned. But even some of these got rich as well. It got so that just having our logo on a film was a draw. It became like having the name Dolby Stereo on a theater marquee—the audience didn’t really know what it meant, but if your theater didn’t have it, you lost out.

  But all of that was still in my future. For now I was walking down the hallway of Building D dodging the little people that we had hired to play Ewoks as they swarmed toward the big stage in their costumes. I saw a lot of things in that hallway. One time I was coming back from lunch and I was wearing a felt hat that I had bought. It looked a little like the famous Indiana Jones hat from the Raiders movies. Well, Harrison Ford was coming the other way. He smiled at me and started to turn into editorial, when all of a sudden he turned back to me in a classic double take. It was the hat, and for once in his life he was the one staring.

  The whole star thing must be annoying. I remember seeing Red Skelton in San Francisco once. I was crossing the street just past I. Magnin, a luxury department store, and Skelton was walking right towards me. I didn’t notice him at first, but when I did, he saw it in my eyes and beamed at me. The very famous spend their lives anticipating you are going to notice them. They know it’s coming and they wait for it, and it’s a small relief to them when it arrives.

  I had grown up in this same Marin County where the Lucasfilm empire was now located. It was always a well-to-do suburb of San Francisco, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from the city. I remember my introduction to motion picture magic was when my mother took me to see the set of the movie Blood Alley, starring John Wayne and Lauren Bacall and directed by William Wellman, in about 1954. The movie scouts had located an old Chinese fishing village called “China Camp,” which was actually not far from Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic, where I now worked. The thing I remember is that as my mother and I walked into the camp, which had been dressed to look like it was actually in China, I saw a large stack of boulders piled up to one side, but when I brushed against them, they moved. It surprised me. How could they move, I barely touched them? Ah, they are fake. The movie guys had made them out of paper and expertly painted them to look real. I was struck with the idea that a
dults actually had jobs doing things like this, and they worked in the make-believe world of motion pictures. I was seven. Duly noted.

  By the time I was twelve years old, I was still in Marin but my parents were both dead. My father had died of a stroke, or so I thought, and then when I was maybe seven or eight, I started to realize that my mother was terribly ill. She had acquired hepatitis during my birth, but while my father was alive she had been able to keep it in check. Now it started to worsen, and her doctors advised selling the big old San Francisco house with its three floors of stairways. So she moved back to Marin to be close to her family. She bought a single-level house in an exclusive area of Kentfield that had servants’ quarters and was a short drive to her brother and her aunt, who everyone called Aunt Bobbitt.

  My brother wouldn’t say it, but he knew she was going to die. We had arguments about it where I maintained that she could still get well. How dreadful and fearful those conversations were. I remember thinking, what will we do, what will happen to us?

  She was in and out of the hospital and spent a lot of time in bed. I remember coming home from summer vacation and visiting her bedroom where she spent most days now, lying down. I was happy to be home and almost skipping around the house when I heard her say, “If he would slow down for a minute, I would give him a kiss.”

  That was a shock—our family was not huggers and kissers. My mother never kissed me or held me. She would use her handkerchief, wet by her tongue, to clean my face if it was dirty, but that was about as intimate as it got. It never bothered me. It was normal—she loved us but just didn’t outwardly show it. I had slept over at a friend’s house one time and told him about all this, and his mother came in and kissed me good-night that evening. She must have overheard me.

  The worst part came one evening when I was watching television and the news came on. During the newscast the anchor said, “We are sending out an appeal. Please give blood for Margaret Kimberlin, who needs it very badly.” I couldn’t believe my ears. He was talking about my mother!

  She died the day before my birthday. I received all these presents that I was so anxious to get, yet I was riddled with guilt for caring more about my toys than my mother. Our sheltered life evaporated quickly as the high walls of a relatively wealthy family began to dissolve.

  Slowly, everything in the house got sold or was given away, including my dog. They told me she went to a ranch family, but I never believed that. All my toys, everything was gone, including the house, which was sold at a slight loss. That house is still there today, and when I worked in Marin, years later, I used to drive over and sit in front of it. It was like waking up from a bad dream, but it wasn’t a dream. Somehow my connection to generations of family had been wiped out here, and it had taken me decades to understand the power of that.

  My brother Jimmy and I were split up. He went to live with our Uncle DeWitt, who had six children, and I went to live with our Great-Aunt Bobbitt. We made the best of it. I didn’t like living with my great-aunt because she just seemed so ancient. She had never learned to drive, which was unusual for California, and she always referred to a car as “the machine.” She would say, “Jimmy, bring the machine around.”

  I slept in the living room in her small one-bedroom apartment. We lived right next to the hospital where my mother had died. This was good and bad. It brought back painful memories for me, but there had been a good side to my mother’s last months. Bobbitt had been a professional nurse, and she could walk to mother’s room every day to make sure she was properly cared for. Also, near the end, she made sure the will was correct and that a guardian was selected to take care of us.

  Years later I worked with a woman who, having heard a little about my childhood, said to me, “You are remarkably unscrewed up for having gone through that.” This surprised me because I guess it had never occurred to me that I might have been “screwed up” by this. She also said, “I envy you because you know exactly what you want, and I have no idea of what I want.” She was right: I did know what I wanted, and it started with my second encounter with the movie business.

  Great-Aunt Bobbitt had a next-door neighbor in the apartment building named Mrs. Hickman who left her television running day and night. Like my great-aunt, this neighbor just seemed to be another little old lady to me. Whenever I went over to her place to bring things my aunt wanted her to have, the TV was always blaring. One day I asked my aunt about this and she said, “Oh, she doesn’t want to miss the broadcast of any old movies. You’re too young to remember, but do you know who she is? That’s Bessie Barriscale and she was the biggest silent-screen star in the country in 1910, and for a few years afterward. Her husband was a film director.”

  In the 1950s television was relatively new and they filled airtime with hundreds of old movies, which they could get for practically nothing. The TV stations broadcast them almost randomly. You never knew when something might appear, as the TV schedules were sketchy at best. So Bessie ran the television day and night, to catch not only her old films, but those of all her movie pals.

  She was a major star for Thomas Ince and was directed by Cecil B. DeMille in Rose of the Rancho, which was a hit in 1914. Bessie had played opposite William Desmond Taylor in Not My Sister, and in later years her friend Mary Pickford cast her as her daughter in Secrets.

  When I started studying film in college, I began to learn who some of these people were. Thomas Ince commanded a large Hollywood studio, and some say he was murdered by William Randolph Hearst, on the Hearst yacht. And when the great Sunset Boulevard was made, with Gloria Swanson playing the faded silent film star, she was given the composite screen name of Norma Desmond as an echo to great silent star names of the past, including Bessie’s former costar, William Desmond Taylor.

  It was this long-ago neighbor, Mrs. Hickman, that introduced me to the idea that a person could actually work in motion pictures.

  The Droid Olympics

  Along with the amazing roster of talented people that worked at Lucasfilm when I started in 1982 was an even larger group of people who might otherwise have been canning peas or working as secretaries. They had no film background or motion picture experience of any kind. Yet, through happenstance or pure luck, they had been swept into this relatively new and hugely successful company in every conceivable position from receptionist to horse wrangler at the Ranch. After a few months many of these employees would conclude that they were now in the motion picture business and that there should be no limit to their ambitions. Indeed, over the years there appeared to be no limit. One of the original receptionists became the head of all production. A woman that started off on the maintenance crew, empting the trash baskets, became a top digital engineer that now works at Pixar, the hugely successful animation company.

  In part, the company was a meritocracy where anyone who was smart and ambitious had an opportunity to advance. As with most companies, the tone was set from the top, and that was George Lucas. He had come from nowhere, and the message to the employees was that you could come from nowhere too and still succeed. There was no better example of this than Chris, a young fellow I came to know while helping him get a small film made for a college project.

  Years earlier, George had been looking for someone to watch over his enormous Skywalker Ranch property as it was being developed, and Chris related to me how he came to be that person. He met for his interview with George and Marcia Lucas at their home in San Anselmo, California. They had purchased the oldest house in Marin County after the success of American Graffiti and had returned it to the elegant mansion it once had been. Sometime late in the interview, Chris, who was only twenty-three or so, asked whether, if he were hired, his friends could visit. “Of course,” George said. “This will be your home.”

  Just at that moment there was a light knock on the door and George’s executive secretary and gatekeeper, Jane Bay, stuck her head in and said, “I’m sorry to bother you, George, but I ha
ve Sir Laurence Olivier on the phone, and he wishes to speak with you.” What happened next still puzzled Chris a little bit as he related, “George said to her, ‘I’m talking to Chris right now. Tell him I’ll call back.’” That doesn’t happen in Hollywood.

  The flip side of this field of opportunities was the minefield of ambitions it set off in some, and I would have plenty of firefights with these individuals in the days and years to come.

  Early on, the big question in my mind was whether I could compete in the deep end of the pool where the highly skilled people swam. I was about to find out.

  Every year there was an event called the Droid Olympics, pitting the editorial staff of all the local film companies against each other. On a given weekend we would gather at Walter Murch’s house in Inverness. Walter is a legend in the film business for his talents as an editor, sound designer, and author. He represents those amazingly talented people that make directors’ movies so much better than they otherwise would have been. His editing and sound design work on Apocalypse Now and The Godfather, to name just two, is a large part of what makes such an indelible impression on everyone who sees the films. What really sets him apart, however, is his ability to write and lecture on filmmaking. He is the only film professional I have ever met who not only excels at the craft, but can also give an explanation of the intellectual framework of making movies that is profound and effective.

  The Friday before the event, George came by the effects editorial department at ILM to deliver the T-shirts he designed for us to wear as part of his team. Whenever I got the chance, I always tried to say something provocative to him just to see if I could get him to talk or tell moviemaking “war stories” like we all did when we got together outside of work. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. This time I said something stupid like, “With these shirts, how can we lose?” He turned to me with a weird look and said, “At my rate, those are the most expensive T-shirts you will ever own.”