What Lucas had learned was that it was possible to build a world convincingly in the computer: sets could be completed or constructed entirely, backgrounds could be dropped in, skies could even be darkened. “I think we may have reached a level here where we have actually created reality,” said Lucas, “which, of course, is what we were trying to do all along.”151
So would there be more Star Wars then? This time, Lucas had a definitive answer: “I plan to start work on the screenplays soon.”152
11
A Digital Universe
1994–1999
George Lucas began the morning of Tuesday, November 1, 1994, as he did most weekday mornings, coming downstairs to the kitchen of his house in San Anselmo—still called Parkhouse or Park Way by those who remembered—to have breakfast with his children. He was exhausted; he’d been up all night tending to thirteen-year-old Amanda, who was nursing a cold, and the morning had come too soon. Still, being a father would always be Lucas’s proudest achievement; in 2015 he would note that he wanted his epitaph to read “I was a great dad.”1 Spending the mornings with the kids just before school was one of his favorite parts of the day, a time when he could be at his silliest, whether he was throwing one of them over his shoulder or arguing playfully about the day’s schedule. After breakfast, he drove Amanda and six-year-old Katie to school, just as he always did—only today, instead of continuing out to the ranch, Lucas returned home to Parkhouse, climbed the stairs to his office, sat down at his desk, and prepared to start writing the script for the next Star Wars film.
Lucas knew this was a big deal; before he had even written a word, he took a moment to be interviewed on camera, looking confident and remarkably unfazed by the task he had before him. “I’m all set,” he told his off-camera interviewer as he sank into his chair. “Now all I need is an idea.” Even though Lucas was now fifty years old, his preferred attire had changed little in the past three decades: today’s outfit consisted of jeans, tennis shoes, and a blue-and-green-plaid shirt, open at the collar. His beard had gone mostly white. His hair—Lucas had always been blessed with good hair—was swept back and up into a towering salt-and-pepper pompadour. The voice was still reedy, but there was new fire in his eyes as he chatted casually with the interviewer about his writing process (“It takes a great deal of concentration”) and his hopes that the digital technology at his disposal would finally allow him to bring any world he might summon on the page directly to the screen. “I didn’t want to go back and write one of these movies unless I had the technology available to really tell the kind of story I was interested in telling,” he explained later. “I wanted to be able to explore the world I’d created to its fullest. So I waited until I had the technological means to do that.”2
But technology wasn’t going to make the actual writing any easier. In that department, Lucas remained almost defiantly analog, writing his treatment out in longhand on lined notebook paper, just as he had back in 1972. As he sat down at his desk that November, his plan was to write all three movies at once—an ambitious goal, particularly for someone who agonized over writing as much as Lucas did. But he promised there was a method in this particular brand of madness: “I’ll take a year to write them, a year to prepare them, and a year to shoot them,” he explained. “And I’ll shoot them all at once.” The one thing he wasn’t planning to do, however, was direct them, suggesting only that he would “decide after [he got] the films prepared.”3 But there was, he thought, little chance of his being in the director’s chair; as miserable as writing made him, directing was the one part of the filmmaking process he dreaded the most, now largely because it required him to be away from his children for long stretches at a time.
Coppola had always affectionately referred to Lucas as “a single mother,” but it was a label Lucas wore with pride. “There’s no one I admire more than single mothers,” he told the New York Times, “because they are the real heroes.”4 Indeed, the policies Lucas had put in place in his company were family friendly enough that Working Mother magazine had named Lucas a Family Champion in 1994, a designation given to CEOs who oversaw a workplace supportive of the needs of working parents. The same magazine had listed Lucasfilm among the best companies for working mothers, citing the ranch’s two child care centers, flexible work schedules, and progressive policies that provided paid leave for employees to attend to sick family members, as well as insurance coverage for domestic partners and their dependents. “We’ve discovered that quality of life is a much greater asset in securing people than high salaries,” Lucas said. “[We’re] just doing what one should be doing.” He also pointed out that he, too, was a single parent of three. “I guess I qualify as a working mother,” he added, to Coppola’s likely delight.5
“It’s through me that the organization hopefully tries to take a more compassionate view of its employees and what we do,” Lucas told Time magazine on another occasion. “I rule at the will of the people who work for me.”6 He didn’t, however, rule alongside Doug Norby, who had unceremoniously resigned as Lucasfilm’s president and CEO in 1992 to return to the board of directors. At that time, Lucas had issued a tight-lipped statement wishing Norby well, then quietly promoted his vice president for business affairs, Gordon Radley, to the post of president and chief operating officer, a position he would hold for nearly a decade, largely owing to his ability to stay out of Lucas’s way. The shake-up had raised eyebrows on Wall Street, with some analysts wondering aloud whether Lucas intended to take his company public. But Lucas, as the company’s sole stockholder, had no intention of giving up that kind of control.
Lucas’s form of benevolent dictatorship was obviously working; morale was generally up and turnover was low. “I find myself with this little country,” Lucas observed. “It’s got about 2,000 citizens and they are very complex. Some are very loyal and some of them are very dissatisfied.… [Y]ou have to try to make things work. And it’s not that easy. But you try to keep people from being used and abused and listen to their grievance and try to do what is fair.”7 Consequently, Lucasfilm employees could choose from a wide range of services and benefits, especially at Skywalker Ranch, where they could enjoy three restaurants and enroll in a variety of classes, including yoga, ballet, and tai chi.
And Lucas was still working to both expand and consolidate his empire. Over the past few years, he had continued to acquire land adjacent to the ranch—and was still doing so in his accountant’s name—eventually increasing Skywalker to nearly five thousand acres. While Lucas would finally win approval to build three new administrative office buildings on the nearby Big Rock Ranch, ILM would remain stranded in the warehouses in San Rafael, a casualty of continued pushback by Marin County residents who refused to be swayed by Lucas’s promises of new jobs and protected open space.
Even as Lucas grumbled about its absence from Skywalker Ranch, ILM continued on its streak of Oscar-winning visual effects. After the razzle-dazzle of Jurassic Park in 1993, ILM had awed audiences the next year with more subtle and even more convincing effects for Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump, superimposing actor Tom Hanks into historical footage of President Kennedy, creating crowds at a rally in Washington, D.C., and digitally compositing the feather that floated over the opening credits. With ILM in his corner, Lucas was regarded as the sage of digital filmmaking, with everyone else trying to catch up. Steven Spielberg, now with an Oscar to his name following the success of Schindler’s List, looked on with admiration. “ILM has no peer and there is no one even close,” said Spielberg, who had just founded his own DreamWorks production company in partnership with music magnate David Geffen and former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg. Journalists, sniffing for a story about strife between Lucas and Spielberg, suggested that DreamWorks might eventually eclipse Lucasfilm in the realm of digital effects—but Lucas shrugged it all off as nonsense. “I want to see Steven succeed. I don’t think him succeeding… is going to hurt me,” he told the Los Angeles Times, adding, “We have an agreement not to ove
rtly hurt each other.”8
Still, the larger and more successful Lucasfilm became, the more Lucas raged and railed against the Hollywood machine. Even as the head of a billion-dollar company, Lucas still saw himself as the misunderstood little guy. His company, he insisted, was just “a little mud hut outside the castle.”9 The studio system was dead, he proclaimed. “It died… when the corporations took over. The studio heads suddenly became agents and lawyers and accountants,”10 people who were “more interested in stock options than making good movies.”11 Like Luke Skywalker and the rebels defying the odds to beat the Empire, he was the leader of a small group of revolutionaries who had squared off against the faceless, soulless Hollywood machine. “They see us as outcasts, as those wacky guys up there who cause trouble because we want creative freedom,” Lucas told the New York Times.12 “Up here, we don’t have stockholders or dividends. Everything I make goes back into making something else. If we make a mistake, we die.” Ultimately, said Lucas, adopting the tones of the radical hippie many supposed him to be, “we learned one rule that came out of the ’60s: Acquire the means of production.”13
It all sounded positively revolutionary, but Carrie Fisher knew better. “Skywalker [Ranch],” observed Fisher drolly, “is where George gets to make up the rules.”14
Days before sitting down in his office to begin handwriting his treatment for Episode I, Lucas had already sent Rick McCallum, his producer from Young Indiana Jones, out to scout locations, billing all travel to the production company Lucas had set up for the new trilogy, JAK Productions—named for his children, Jett, Amanda, and Katie. At the same time, ILM artist Doug Chiang was hired to serve as the art director for the prequels, stepping into the role filled by Ralph McQuarrie on the first Star Wars trilogy. “Even though I’d just started writing,” said Lucas, “I already knew certain things that needed to be designed,” such as spaceships and planets. Meanwhile, other artists at ILM had been tasked with working on character designs that were still little more than a few brief phrases on the page, with Lucas giving his artists vague descriptions—“This character is cowardly and insecure”—and letting them take it from there.15 That included the conceptual design for the amphibious Jar Jar Binks, a character Lucas had high hopes for, who would go through nearly eighteen months of design.
After more than twenty rewrites and revisions, Lucas would have the first rough draft for Episode I—at this point called simply The Beginning—completed on January 13, 1995. The script would never be entirely finished; building off the strategy he’d used on Young Indiana Jones, he would revise the script during filming and even during post-production. But he was comfortable enough with certain elements of the story to ask effects supervisor David Dozoretz and Ben Burtt—who was becoming one of Lucas’s most deft editors—to cut together a number of low-resolution, roughly animated storyboard sequences, called “animatics,” to guide the computer animators in much the same way Lucas had used his World War II dogfight footage to inspire the visual effects team on the original Star Wars. “The only way you can evaluate the effects shots you’re going to need is to cut in temporary action scenes,” said Lucas. “With Episode I, it was the first time I was able to use computerized animatics to pre-visualize the entire film before I even started shooting.”16 The first sequence Burtt and Dozoretz were instructed to assemble, then, was the podracing scene, the high-tech drag race Lucas envisioned as young Anakin Skywalker’s ticket to freedom. Fast cars had always been one of Lucas’s favorite means of escape, whether it was the car in THX, John Milner’s deuce coupe in American Graffiti, or even the Millennium Falcon. It was little surprise that Lucas had included it in the script from the very beginning.
While Lucas was keeping the development of Episode I a tightly guarded secret, just the knowledge that he was at work on the next film seemed enough to excite Star Wars fans. “Part of the reason for doing this is that it’s the first question I get asked,” said Lucas. “I think a lot of people want to see it.”17 That certainly seemed to be the case, to judge by the reemergence of Star Wars in popular culture—on television, the Energizer Bunny could be seen battling Darth Vader in a commercial for batteries—and the revived interest in Star Wars–related merchandise. In August 1995, Lucas re-released the Star Wars trilogy on home video, this time issuing the three films with THX sound and a digitally remastered picture. To Lucas’s shock and delight, more than 28 million cassettes were sold, generating a profit to Lucasfilm of more than $100 million.
The same year, Hasbro—which had soaked up Kenner years earlier—reactivated its option to produce action figures and issued a new line of Star Wars toys under the imprint “The Power of the Force.” A manager at FAO Schwarz in New York was surprised to see that there were more adults than children buying the new line of toys—a singularity that made the new figures some of the bestselling toys of the year. Marketing directors everywhere would make a note. Toys weren’t just for kids anymore. Especially Star Wars toys.
In fact, Lucas had shrewdly convened a “Star Wars Summit” at Skywalker Ranch for licensees and international agents, where he briefed them on his plans for the future of the Star Wars franchise. Over the course of two days of presentations, Lucas reinforced the need for him to maintain quality control, especially in the areas of publishing, where some characters—such as Luke Skywalker, who’d been given a love interest in a fiery smuggler named Mara Jade—were living lives far beyond the ones he had written for them in the original trilogy. At a second summit in April 1995, Lucas—who showed up bleary-eyed, joking that he’d been dragged away from writing the script—tantalized the room by hinting that he was considering directing the first of the three prequels himself.
As Lucas continued slowly to ramp up pre-production—by early 1996 he would have his art department putting together storyboards for a film that didn’t yet have a workable script—he was becoming more and more convinced that digital technology would help him make Episode I both quickly and cheaply. “The techniques that we pioneered in the [Young Indiana Jones] TV series that we’re now using in features are going to be one of the major differences about the way movies are made,” Lucas proclaimed.18 Perhaps the most critical of those techniques involved “blurring the line” between production and post-production, so new scenes could be added or old scenes could be re-shot or re-staged, even during the editing process. “It’s not an assembly line. I don’t write first, then design, then shoot. I’m doing everything together,” he told a reporter.19 And because he planned to use the computer to create or fill in most of the sets, Lucas was predicting big savings in the expense of making his films. “I don’t think it’s going to cost much relative to the top end that I would ever make a movie for,” he predicted. “I would never go above the $50 million range.”20
That wouldn’t even be close. When all was said and done, Episode I would cost nearly $115 million. And almost all of it would come out of Lucas’s own pocket.
In the meantime, producer Rick McCallum—who’d spent nearly a year scouting suitable locations and facilities to shoot Lucas’s still unfinished script—had found a home base for the production. Briefly, Elstree Studios in London had been considered, though that was mostly for sentimental reasons; every Star Wars movie had been filmed there from 1976 on. Since the fire sale of the facility in the late 1980s, however, the studio was a shell of its former self, and hardly large enough for a production of the scope Lucas was envisioning, even with many of the sets being built in the computer. Instead, McCallum would find what Lucas needed a little less than ten miles northwest of Elstree at the Leavesden Aerodrome—a gigantic former Rolls-Royce factory that had recently been converted to film production for the James Bond picture GoldenEye.
In the summer of 1996, then, Lucas had McCallum reserve the entire studio—including its one-hundred-acre back lot—for two and a half years, which would leave the studio at his disposal, as needed, until practically the day the film was to be released. Immediately, Lucas dispatched a team fr
om the art department, led by production designer Gavin Bocquet, to begin constructing sets across Leavesden’s nine soundstages. Even at this early date, coordination with ILM was critical, as the art department and construction team had to know exactly what parts of the set to build and what to leave for the computer to construct digitally. Most sets would end up being a hybrid of partially constructed pieces—a platform, a bit of wall, a door, and a table—surrounded by blue- or greenscreen onto which the rest of the set could be superimposed digitally later. Lucas and others would come to refer to this amalgamation of high and low tech as a “digital back lot.” By December, nearly sixty sets would be scattered across the Leavesden soundstages, taking up about 800,000 square feet of space.
As he fielded regular reports from London and continued to revise his script, Lucas found—quite to his surprise—that he was enjoying playing in his Star Wars sandbox again. He was especially intrigued by the nearly infinite possibilities that digital filmmaking put into his hands, and he had one more test subject in mind over which to wave his digital wand before unleashing its full power on Episode I. A movie so terrible, said Lucas, that “every time I saw it, I’d think, ‘Oh God, that’s so awful, I can’t watch this.’”21
George Lucas Page 43