Inside the Star Wars Empire

by Bill Kimberlin

  This wasn’t Raymond Chandler’s L.A. or my L.A., it was just L.A., like Hollywood is just Hollywood. If you’ve ever been there, it’s not Hollywood. But there was a beauty to it, a beauty you could only see at night. “This was a town where people used to sleep out on porches,” Chandler had written, and I could see that. It wasn’t all freeways; there were leafy neighborhoods that residents rarely ever needed to leave. I had stayed for a time in a Craftsman bungalow in Silver Lake not far from the old movie ranch of cowboy Tom Mix. The area was as rural as a TV Western set in the 1950s where as kids we tried to spot airplanes and power poles in the distant backgrounds of Hopalong Cassidy episodes.

  It was summer and it was hot. We worked nights mostly. We were not screening the movie, we were screening reels of the movie. Whatever the lab finished printing that day. Originally films were one reel long. That was ten minutes in screen time. Then the “two-reeler” was introduced. Chaplin made “two-reelers”—twenty minutes in screen time. By 1924 the great Erich von Stroheim had made his masterpiece, Greed, in forty-two reels. It was nearly eight hours long and that got him fired. The severely edited version we have left has fired the imaginations of film historians for decades about what might be in those other, by now long lost, thirty-six reels.

  The industry eventually settled on roughly two hours as a feature length. This meant that a 35mm movie was sent to theaters on six projection reels. Each reel comprised a two-reeler, or twenty minutes of film.

  So when I say we were watching reels, not the whole movie, I mean we were perhaps screening an entire evening of reel six only. It was boring, yet somehow being in the belly of the beast, the place that manufactured prints of movies we all loved at one time or another, was, with a little imagination, kind of exciting. This was the steamy hot machine room of the dream factory.

  The town has always been magic for me. If you wanted to make movies, where else in the world could you walk into a coffee shop and see Sally Kellerman from the movie M*A*S*H getting coffee or ordering breakfast with her agent, like I had? Where else could you find motion picture rental houses where you could get any production equipment you could imagine from 10K movie lights to Panavision cameras? People used to ask, “Why Hollywood?” and the answer was, “If you need fifty cop cars on a set tomorrow, you can get them with a phone call.” Today, in Silicon Valley or San Francisco, it’s the same thing. Need fifty programmers? They are a phone call away.

  I loved just being a part of it. What’s the old joke about the kid asking for directions in New York? “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice, son, practice.” Well, Hollywood was my Carnegie Hall, and whether I was in the bowels of a motion picture lab or at Du-par’s restaurant across from Universal Studios, I might as well have been on Broadway in New York. This was where I thought I belonged.

  Eventually Oscar night rolled around, and Ken Ralston picked up the Oscar awarded to our crew for best achievement in visual effects. Rushing through the names to thank, he mentioned mine. Let me tell you, when your name is mentioned before a viewership of several hundred million people . . . your phone rings. I don’t know how they get the number, but it does ring. I wish I could say it was an old girlfriend calling to apologize for dumping me, but it wasn’t. More than likely it was an old landlord, but I can’t remember. I do remember that one of our guys who was nominated got sent two tickets to the Oscars and took an ad out in the San Francisco Chronicle asking for a date. He had his pick.

  Several months after Jedi was released to theaters, instructions came to the then-manager of ILM editorial, Howie, to take a plane and supervise the transfer from a specially made, low-contrast dupe negative to a videotape master for duplicating the massive number of home videos that would be sold worldwide. We were all expecting this, except we were not expecting the job to be done anywhere else but in Hollywood. Instead, Howie flew to Farmington, Michigan—a most unlikely destination for such an important transfer process. I wondered why this was happening and researched the matter. If I was going to be in the motion picture business, I had to learn how it worked.

  In 1976 Universal and Disney studios sued Sony for manufacturing video recorders capable of recording and playing copyrighted material. They eventually lost in a Supreme Court decision. An additional decision that same year upheld the first-sale doctrine, which basically states that something purchased legally can be either resold or rented without infringing on the creators rights under the copyright law.

  In 1977 a man from Farmington, Michigan, named Andre Blay came up with the idea to release prerecorded motion pictures on videocassette. That year, he licensed fifty films from 20th Century Fox for home video release and set up a transfer system. Blay paid a fee of $300,000 plus $500,000 yearly to Fox to license movies from their catalog. By the mid-1980s his operation was so successful that Hollywood’s major studios were going to him for the home video releases of their movies. By 1987, with sales of videos surpassing movie theater grosses, Fox simply bought him out for $7.2 million rather than trying to build their own facility. That was a classic Hollywood move—don’t build it, just buy it.

  It was in this environment that Howie flew off to the unlikely destination of Farmington, where the video transfers were made in real time, with hundreds of video recording machines all rolling in tandem for the two-plus hours it took to record the movie.

  The fact was that home video, which Hollywood had been forced to embrace after kicking and screaming to try to stop it, was now driving movie ticket sales at the box office because the more movies people saw that they liked, the more movies they wanted to see. It also allowed all kinds of forgotten films to have a new life and to be introduced to newer generations. Home video became the babysitter for a nation’s children and also kept franchises like Star Wars alive as people actively awaited new episodes.

  Somehow the flood of home videos across the country and around the world had not only enriched the filmmakers, but also embedded movies even more deeply into the American culture. The public became more interested in movies than ever. I would go so far as to argue that they had become even more popular than in the heyday of the big studios when people were seeing two or three movies a week. The technology had changed but the audience was again watching that many or more movies a week, only now it was on home video. In turn this seemed to prompt reporters from all the major newspapers and magazines to take more interest in how blockbusters were made. Part of that story had to do with the field of visual effects due to the fact that our work was having such a big impact on the motion picture business, both in the way these effects were being deployed and the impact their success was bringing to the business of making movies itself.

  At first, nothing we were doing was really new besides applying some newer technology to age-old techniques, like controlling cameras with some early computers for instance. Miniatures, matte paintings, moving cameras, sound effects, and music had all been used for decades by filmmakers to round out their arsenal of dramatic devices for telling stories. Most of this was behind-the-scenes stuff, only of interest to a limited a number of people. Then slowly the men behind the curtain became of interest.

  We had done amazing things in movies like E.T. or Indiana Jones or Star Wars long before we had anything to work with beyond models and optical printers, but when computer graphics started to arrive, whole new worlds of possibilities started to open up. If, as it has been written, there are really only thirty-six dramatic situations, thirty-six story lines that everyone from the ancient Greeks to Spielberg have been buffing up and presenting as new for centuries, then special visual effects were a welcome aid to yet another re-spinning of these old tales. A kingdom’s princess is threatened by an evil lord? We can help you reset it as a space opera. Our computer division had made a planet transform in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan using computer graphics as early as 1982.

  The fact that these reporters were showing up to do stories on us reflected the publ
ic’s interest in what was formerly the somewhat arcane world of movie technicians. This kind of surprised me and also reminded me of a much earlier change I had noticed.

  In 1975 Rona Barrett, a Hollywood gossip columnist, was hired to do a segment on the national morning news show Good Morning America. To my astonishment she had started to announce the weekend take of the newest movie releases in dollars. I was intensely interested in this kind of stuff, but I just couldn’t imagine how someone in Podunk, Arkansas, would be interested. But everyone loved it. The studios could use it for advertising: “Our movie is the number one movie in the nation.” This kind of publicity couldn’t be bought. Or could it?

  No one was interested in announcing the number of tickets sold or how many theaters were running a given film (fifty theaters or a thousand?), just the dollars received from the theaters by the distributors. Journalists were careful to never ask too many questions about who was providing these numbers and if they were accurate. It was media/studio back-scratching at its finest. Even today, every Sunday afternoon the top-grossing movies make the national news and the public thinks, “Well, if it made that much money, it must be good.” In at least one case when the numbers submitted by the studio for Forrest Gump left it short of another studio release, new numbers were submitted after the discovery that two theaters in San Francisco had receipts that weren’t counted. Those new numbers converted Gump from number two to “the number one box office hit in the nation,” or so they said.

  The questions the reporters asked us were interesting as well. “When will you be able to create digital actors?” Our answer was always the same: “Why bother? Actors come fairly cheap.” We would use face replacements or whole head replacements where we wanted to use a stunt double in place of the star for making, say, a famous actor look like he was doing something too dangerous for him to actually do. We were trying to help directors tell stories rather than just show some flashy technique. Not that we were above doing flashy—it’s just that most of these were scripts that were brought to us from outside. We were guns for hire when George wasn’t using us. Doing research on building a digital actor would only happen when a client had to have one. Besides, as George has said, “You can’t replace actors. We’ve created duplicates, clones, but they can’t act. They’re a computer, for God’s sake.”

  We avoided research for a time, and this became almost a company mantra in the sense that we didn’t want to do tests in the abstract. Give us real problems and we will solve them for any given movie. We would, of course, bring out our reels of past shows to try to sell clients on using us, but not years’ worth of R&D. “Here is some cool stuff we’ve done in the past,” we would say, “and we can do even better cool stuff for you now, because we are smarter than when we learned how to do that.”

  The Cutting Room Floor

  We were nominated for an Academy Award for visual effects nearly every year and we won our share.2 One of our supervisors, Dennis Muren, has won nine Oscars alone for visual effects. Dennis holds more Oscars than anyone alive.

  The way it worked was that the nominated effects studio was asked to present a film reel of about twenty minutes or so of just the effects from the movie. This reel had to be cut from a standard projection print, so it could not be altered or dressed up in any way from what was in the theaters. Well, this presented problems, because the soundtracks on movies, at least back then, were from an optical stripe printed alongside, but not in sync with, the film images. For technical reasons the sound came about a foot ahead of the images. This meant that when we chopped the picture where we wanted to make a picture cut, we were possibly chopping sound that we didn’t want to lose. We developed techniques, little editing tricks, to make it work, but it meant lots of splices that could break at any time.

  When we were done cutting the reels, they were shipped to the Academy, and a few weeks later all the companies nominated would go down for a big screening at the Academy theater that we called “the bake-off.” All the competing studios were there with their reels. The lights went down, and as the editor, you prayed that your splices didn’t break and spoil the whole presentation, possibly costing your team an Oscar. When the lights came up, we went home and waited for the five best to be picked. After that it wasn’t until Oscar night that we knew who had won.

  We always kept copies of these reels to show potential clients our work and also to screen for visiting big shots who were getting a tour. My favorite to show people was the one from The Empire Strikes Back. That one always impressed people. It was exciting and contained great work. The funny thing is that almost no one has ever seen these reels and they are amazing because they were all of the “wow” scenes from major effects films cut into a nonstop reel of action.

  Sometimes even a bad film could make a good reel. Besides The Empire Strikes Back, probably the best reel I ever saw was for Pearl Harbor, which we worked on in 2000. The effects work in that film was breathtaking when you saw it in one stand-alone reel, having left the lousy acting and the poor storyline on the cutting room floor. That re-creation of the Japanese attack on Pearl was unbelievably real, so much so that I once got complaints from some college history professors about the dangers they saw in what we were capable of doing.

  The history professors descended on me at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. How I wound up lecturing a bunch of professors started at Phil’s barber shop. I have been going to Phil for my haircuts for almost thirty years. Phil is one of those guys they call “connectors.” That observation was made by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point, where he describes a type of person who knows large numbers of people and is in the habit of making introductions. That describes my barber Phil exactly. Phil knows everybody and loves to make introductions.

  Needing a haircut, I set off for Phil’s, pondering something I had just read about a famous paleoanthropological find of Mary Leakey’s: early human footprints captured and preserved in volcanic ash from 3.6 million years ago. These prints revealed tremendous clues about how our ancestors walked, yet there was not enough money to properly house the find from the elements.

  When I hit the chair at Phil’s, I started to expound about what a shame it was that a mere radio preacher could easily raise millions of dollars, yet Mary Leaky was having trouble with funds to protect a hugely important find, one that revealed valuable information about ourselves.

  Phil said, “Bill, Desmond Clark,” gesturing to the gentleman directly across from the barber chair I was sitting in. Dr. Clark was an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, having guided the world’s foremost paleoanthropology program. He had taught most of the leading paleoanthropologists in the world.

  This fellow was all class. A British gentleman educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, he had lived and studied in Berkeley for years. What he said to me was as foreign to an American ear as Swahili. He said, “I am having some people over to my home on Friday for cocktails. Won’t you join us?” Desmond had never seen me before in his life.

  That’s the thing about Phil’s barbershop: You never know who will be sitting there on your next visit. Someone once told me there are dozens of PhDs per square mile in my neighborhood. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I can tell you that the person I bought my house from was one of the discoverers of Element 103 in the periodic table, and Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, is a neighbor. Not to mention the couple who founded and run MoveOn.org, possibly the most influential political organization in the country.

  I wasn’t going to miss this gathering, so my wife and I drove to a slightly different section of the Berkeley hills for cocktails. The affair was somewhat similar to some of my professors’ hosting of graduate students at their homes during my college days, except this group also contained what I like to call famous people you’ve never heard of. For instance, I was introduced to Garniss Curtis, who invented potassium-argon dating to
precisely date fossils. I also met Nick Toth and Kathy Schick, directors of the Stone Age Institute of Anthropology in Bloomington, Indiana.

  Nick and I got to talking, and when he learned what I did for a living, he invited me to give a lecture on special effects at Indiana University, where Nick and Kathy are professors in addition to running their institute for the study of early man. The Stone Age Institute is largely, but not exclusively, funded by Gordon Getty, the oil billionaire from San Francisco. It would not be long before I was flying around on Gordon’s private plane, all thanks to Phil the barber. I will say more about traveling with Gordon later, but just let me say here that his jet is no puny, multimillion-dollar Gulfstream. This is an airliner that Gordon had converted for his personal use.

  For the lecture I brought some behind-the-scenes footage from the film Saving Private Ryan, which I had worked on. The scene I chose to illustrate what was possible to achieve with visual effects did not involve make-believe. There were no spaceships or monsters in what I showed, because I wanted to emphasize that things could be done to alter reality in ways that were not well known.

  Spielberg had wanted a shot that depicted the scene at Omaha Beach a day or so after the ferocious D-Day assault. It would show an armada of ships, landing craft, German blockade and balloons still up, as well as hundreds of troops, tanks, jeeps, etc., swarming the newly taken beach. It would have the feel of a sort of mop-up operation still in progress.

  What we were given to work with was a huge crane shot that slowly revealed a beach with absolutely nothing in the frame other than the ocean and the beach itself. We added everything else. I ran the before and after versions of the shot, which started with a couple of GIs in a passing jeep and then swooped slowly up for an aerial view from a height of maybe twenty-five feet. I didn’t hear a gasp, but the audience I’m sure had never seen such a realistic scene created out of almost nothing. As I found out later, they were just not prepared to see such wholesale fakery in what otherwise appeared to be a straightforward period film.