Inside the Star Wars Empire

by Bill Kimberlin

  In the movie business everyone has a rate—that is, if they are not studio staff people. They work by contract for a given period of time at their given rate. A feature film editor in those days might have made $10,000 a week, which sounds like a lot of money except for the fact that months can go by without any work. This feast-or-famine style of income makes it hard for many people to handle their finances. In a sense, if you work in production, you are fired every Friday. That’s payday. You get paid every week and if they are going to let you go, that’s when it happens. Your goal is to keep getting jobs one after another. This often means no vacations because you are afraid if you turn work down, the next time they won’t call you. You are like an actor, waiting for the phone to ring. This became my life.

  I don’t know what George’s rate was or how he calculated it back then, but for a guy worth about $100 million, it had to be substantial. Still, except for his building sprees, he wasn’t ostentatious. After the Empire Strikes Back came out and was a big success another employee told me, “We all noticed that George got new tires for his Camaro.”

  Oh, and I still have the T-shirt.

  The Droid events were inspired by cutting room tasks that we were all way too familiar with. For instance, who could run the fastest time across the yard and back carrying and not dropping an impossibly high load of empty cardboard trim boxes (used to hold film trims or clips) in their arms. Or who could spin the highest number on the footage counter that is attached to a film synchronizer (which holds picture and soundtrack in sync when winding film). Silly stuff like that.

  When my turn came, I did all of the tasks fairly well except one: running an upright Moviola editing machine, blindfolded, and stopping it when you thought one minute on the time counter had passed. I did it perfectly. I hit the brake on exactly one minute, which shot my score up. All our names were up on a big blackboard and the scores were updated immediately. When I hit the highest score on the board, George, who at that time barely knew who I was, walked over and said, “Nice job.” This from a man who never talked to anyone he didn’t know very well.

  This was a lesson. This guy was so competitive that he could rise out of his reticence if he spotted a winner. My score subsequently sank and I turned back into a pumpkin, but it was fun while it lasted. Now he knew who I was.

  Originally, Return of the Jedi was called Revenge of the Jedi. George had decided to change the name of the movie reportedly because some little kid wrote and reminded him that Jedis don’t seek revenge. Whether they do or not, I have no idea. We all admired and respected George Lucas as a brilliant filmmaker, but after months of work in the trenches trying to pull this movie off, the fantasy stuff had rubbed us a little raw. When the executives and lawyers at the Ranch asked the employees to come up with a name for the company’s central computer system, my department suggested Rochester, after the famed black character portrayed by Eddie Anderson on the old Jack Benny television program. Rochester was supposed to be a valet to Benny but he always got the better of his boss. We hoped for the same results. Instead they chose Endor, which was the moon where the Ewoks lived in the redwood forests. Yikes.

  Still, if we thought something was so strained as to be camp, we would adopt it ourselves. We found many uses for the line “Many Bothans died to bring you this information.” I still like the sentiment in “Do. Or do not. There is no try,” because that comes directly out of George’s personality. He had spent his entire early career with people, sometimes important people, telling him, “You can’t do that.” Henry Ford had said it before, in a slightly different way: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.” I was the recipient of some of this Lucas wisdom one day when I wasn’t expecting it.

  I was still pretty green when George wandered into editorial looking for my boss. “Where’s Ken?” he asked. “They’ve all gone to lunch,” I said. He asked if I could show him the shot, so I took him into the room we called “line-up” where we fashioned the effects shots on these huge old VistaVision editing machines. You could stack multiple layers of movie film, each with its own fighter craft, and run them all at once on these machines. You could also make drawings on clear acetate animation cells for planning modifications, like making all the spaceships fly in patterns. I ran the shot for him and he said something like, “Take this X-wing and blow him up, right at this frame.” For some reason I opened my mouth and said, “I don’t think we can do that.” Wrong answer. George turned to me and said, “Of course we can,” with such force that I instantly glimpsed what had got him where he was. Absolute certainty.

  What did I know about blowing up spaceships? This guy had probably blown up hundreds of them, as well as destroying thousands of stormtroopers. George hadn’t been angry and he didn’t shout, but he woke me up. I had things to learn.

  Most of what I learned was from my boss Ken Ralston. He was a tall, somewhat thin, twenty-eight-year-old effects director, who at first seemed somewhat young to handle all the responsibilities George had given him. He had an almost goofy cartoonist’s sense of self-deprecating humor, and he effectively shielded that he was as ambitious as any of the other star employees. He was an artist who could draw well and he always sat a drawing board, not a desk. He was quite smart and would memorize every shot, its description, and shot number on whatever movie he was working on. He won five Oscars while at ILM.

  When Ken was finally hired away after twenty years by Sony Pictures Imageworks, they made him president and creative head, with what would become a multimillion-dollar salary. The head of Sony, remarking about Ken, said, “Talent loves him.” Translated from Hollywood-speak, that means that all the top directors (somewhat dismissively referred to here as “talent”) liked and respected him. Some of us noticed that the Oscars we were accustomed to winning abated for a while after Ken left.

  What Ken was doing was mounting models of spaceships or even the DeLorean from Back to the Future on mechanical stands that could be controlled both by hand and by computer while filming. Our cameras rode on dollies mounted on tracks so they could swoop past, say, a mounted fighter aircraft from Star Wars or the steam engine in BTTF while the models themselves sat still, yet moved their wings or tilted.

  Each frame of motion picture film was shot in a timed exposure with our camera shutters open for perhaps a second or more to capture enough light—all this in front of a large screen that was backlit a bright blue. We could then optically suck out the blue, leaving just the model to be placed against whatever background we wished. As the audience would have no frame of reference as to size, we could make believers of them when we placed, say, a star field for a space movie or a street scene for the flying car behind our models. One documentary film about how we did our work was called How to Film the Impossible, and that was about the size of it.

  There was one monster shot in Return of the Jedi that I worked on with Ken that first year, called SB19. It was the nineteenth shot in the space battle and is pictured on the cover of this book. This was the shot that George had told Ken that he wanted to be a “wow” shot. Ken had set up four camera crews shooting the battling spaceships for three months just to get this shot. It contained sixty-three separate elements. I’ve never researched it, but it may have been the most complicated effects shot ever optically composited. It would take about ten hours when it came time for the final printing onto a blank piece of raw film negative as spaceships, planets, star fields, laser cannons, explosions, etc., were burned in, one at a time, rewinding the raw stock after each addition. If even the slightest error was made, you had to start all over again.

  Why go to these lengths? It was a calculation. George knew how to entertain an audience and hold their attention. He would open a movie with either an action sequence like the chase in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark or the seemingly endless underbelly of the Star Destroyer in the original Star Wars to give the audience a wonderful shock of seeing what seemed to be
just a glimpse of the amazing visual treats in store for them. Once the audience felt they were in the safe hands of a movie master, George could afford to introduce his characters and story points without fear of losing them. When it worked correctly, he owned the audience.

  I had boxes and boxes and more boxes of film on my desk, all pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle called SB19. I hadn’t designed it or shot it; that was George, Ken, and the art director Joe Johnson’s work. But I had to put it together and some of the spaceships wouldn’t work as shot, so I manipulated them by turning their flight paths upside down. In other cases, I borrowed ships from other shots or other movies. We had tons of reusable elements from the two earlier Star Wars films. This was long before computer graphics or digital filmmaking. In a way, we just hammered on stuff until we made it work.

  It took about two weeks to come up with a rough black-and-white temporary composite of the shot. We were all a little nervous about how this might go over with George. Art, who ran the editorial department at the time, said he thought we would be chewing over this shot for a long time. One of the many coordinators called George’s cutting room in the adjoining building, and he walked over to take a look. I ran it for him and he said, “Great.” That was it. His most frequent expression of approval, and I was glad to get it.

  Now the arduous color compositing process began, using all the original camera negatives that had been shot, but that was someone else’s job. It took two tries to get it right, and there is still a tiny flaw in it which no one will ever see but me. It took almost a year to get that shot from start to finish, so keep that in mind if you ever see the movie. Oh, and look quickly, because it’s only two seconds long.

  I had slowly started to rise out of obscurity at the company. The BBC came by and used my SB19 shot to illustrate the world of special effects in a nationally telecast program both in Britain and in the United States. They filmed Ken and me reenacting our roles. I was at the editing machines and Ken was the creative mastermind. This show helped demonstrate the complexity of creating this movie magic that was starting to change the way that motion pictures were made, marketed, and financed.

  High School Reunion

  I was sitting in screening room D waiting for Jedi dailies to begin. George had just taken his usual seat in the center of the second row, just to the right of a small control panel that held a shaded lamp and some lighted pointers that were used by directors and supervisors to point out any details on the projected images that might be up for discussion.

  We were all watching VistaVision foreground plates of Admiral Ackbar. We were basically looking over the shoulder of a guy with a rubber head sitting at some kind of spaceship controls as he gazed out into space. Of course, there was no space to look at yet because we hadn’t added it. No stars, no planets, nothing but a giant blue screen. There were miles of this footage and George was looking for a section he wanted to use in Jedi. One of the supervisors, probably Richard Edlund, asked George what the window Akbar was looking out of was made of. George said, “Well, that hasn’t come up. When it does come up, we will figure out an answer.”

  So that was it, I thought. That was the whole thing! We were all sitting here participating in a story that George was making up as we went along. When you are telling a made-up story to children, you only add certain details. The others you wait for the children to ask about.

  This was the Monday after George had gone to his high school reunion in Modesto, California, where he grew up. Who hasn’t fretted about, or dreamed about, going to their high school reunion? What would it be like to return to your small rural school as one of the richest, most celebrated people in the world?

  While we had always joked among ourselves about the movie business being “high school, with money,” with this visit somehow George had tied the two together and I began to wonder, who is this guy, anyway? Why is he so different? How did a D student from Modesto, California, become the biggest director and movie mogul of all time? So I drove down to Modesto one weekend to see what I could find out.

  I saw the town, the high school, the family home, etc. But to me it was the store that told the most. There it was in the downtown area, the family business, an office supply store run by George’s father. I had seen the father once out at the Ranch wandering around with a huge smile on his face. He certainly must have been a proud father. I imagined that the Modesto store told the whole story. It could not have been more mid-America looking, run by a hard-working businessman who had spawned a dutiful son.

  I had read that George, at first unhappy with college, had called his father asking how long he had to stick it out. It struck me that it was the father who had cast the die for this talented young man. Just as all the male characters in American Graffiti were different facets of George, his father’s rock-solid, small-town business acumen loomed over his creative work and his ability to build what would eventually become a multibillion-dollar empire.

  His wife Marcia often said that George was “centered,” meaning he was comfortable with himself and his ability to achieve his goals. But there was much more. After achieving success, he had deliberately left Hollywood and moved to Northern California, away from the creative echo chamber of the studios that were fraught with gossip, celebrity, and trend-followers. That was the opposite of what almost everyone else did.

  George also made smart business deals, passing over short-term gains and investing in long-term ones instead. He built his own studio and staffed it with an army of creative people who were happy to work outside the rigid studio systems of Los Angeles. He wrote and developed his own projects, hiring screenwriters to help structure the stories. He invested in new technologies designed to enhance the moviegoing experience as well as simplify the production processes that would speed things up and save money. Above all, he avoided debt like the plague, remembering how it had once brought down and almost destroyed the dreams of his friend Francis Coppola.

  In addition, George was able to identify trends and evaluate their worth. I remember one time when there was a lot of talk in Hollywood about bringing interactivity to movies and it being suggested that the audience be allowed to choose, for example, how a film would end. George’s remark was succinct and accurate: “Interactive is games. How hard is that to figure out?” Soon we had a Games Division.

  These attributes set him apart from most of Hollywood and the rest of the business world as well. I would argue that not since Thomas Edison and Henry Ford have we seen a more ambitious creative artist. And for these characteristics to be part of an artist is, I think, even more unusual. So far, it seems that Steve Jobs is the one to have received most of the plaudits, but I think the more Lucas’s accomplishments are recognized, the higher his stock will rise.

  On top of all this, George was just a good filmmaker. I’ve seen his student films and they all showed talent. It’s true that he barely escaped high school, but once he got to college and found he could make movies, he just got better and better at it.

  None of the great directors of the past had gone to film school, yet our generation of filmmakers had. While attending my school I always wondered what effect our little films, and all the underground films, art films, and independent films, would have. Would they survive? Would they be saved and someday be of any note, however small? As yet, they are neither saved nor recognized. However, they did influence Hollywood theatrical movies, especially in the 1970s. The film-school era replaced what were in large part filmed plays with an almost silent-era style of filmmaking that had been lost since the advent of sound. Suddenly we saw camera work, editing, and sound design with the same enthusiasm as that of pioneers like Abel Gance, Sergei Eisenstein, and Erich von Stroheim. There was a reason that on the wall in back of my editorial department bench there hung a huge black-and-white photograph of Eisenstein hard at work editing one of his films.

  While George’s locating a motion picture company in Northern Califo
rnia may have seemed like a crazy idea to Hollywood, there was in actuality a precedent. This was where, in 1872, Eadweard Muybridge took his famous series of stop-motion photographs of Leland Stanford’s trotting horse, Occident, that when projected became animated photographic movement, leading eventually to the invention of motion pictures. This was where, in 1916, Leon Douglas invented and patented the first natural-color motion picture method which later became Technicolor. It’s where Charlie Chaplin, also in 1916, filmed the most famous exit in cinema history: the last shot in The Tramp, where he walks away from the camera down that lonely dirt road. Lastly, it is where, in 1927 in San Francisco, Philo T. Farnsworth invented the first television. All of this far from the movie capital of Hollywood and the financial center of New York.

  It has been said that George was trying to escape the trade unions by coming north; however, he quickly signed up with the local unions and we were all members. I think it was mostly to get away from the stifling atmosphere of Hollywood. Here in Northern California one was freer to create new things and try out new ideas. Coming to the Bay Area meant entering the triangle of creative technologies that exists between the University of California at Berkeley, the juggernaut of Stanford University and Silicon Valley, and the soon-to-be-center of digital creativity, San Francisco.

  The author Rebecca Solnit has observed that “the two industries that have most powerfully defined contemporary life . . . Hollywood and Silicon Valley . . . are responsible for that part of a new world made from an amalgamation of technology and entertainment. We live today in the future launched there.”1