Inside the Star Wars Empire

by Bill Kimberlin

  Immediately upon Germany’s defeat, the military sent in specialists and found a new type of recorder, a tape recorder. Not wax, not vinyl, not wire, but magnetic tape. Bill Palmer and a partner, Jack Mullin, got their hands on the German machine and developed an American version. Soon, through the Ampex company of Palo Alto, all major studios and broadcast networks were using tape recorders. These engineers’ work also led to the early video recorders.

  I started as a sound technician, but the company did every motion picture service there was, from script to screen. It was here that I learned how to make movies. If I wanted to know something, I went to Bill and asked. I quickly learned that when Bill explained it, it was so easy to understand, because he actually knew what he was talking about. You get the confusing answers from people who don’t.

  Since film school I had been trying to finish my documentary historical film on boxing champion Jack Johnson, who was the inspiration for the Broadway play The Great White Hope, by Howard Sackler. If I had not been a poor film student, I might have been able to beat Sackler to the punch, but I could only afford to work on it nights and weekends, and then only when I had some extra money. But then something happened to change all that.

  I had been away from my apartment for a couple of days, and as I opened the door upon my return, the phone was ringing. Picking up, I heard, “I have been trying to reach you for days. Francis Coppola saw your film and wants to talk to you.” This was the phone call all young filmmakers wait for, and I was no exception.

  Coppola and several of his filmmaking buddies, including George Lucas, had founded a movie production company in San Francisco called American Zoetrope. The Zoetrope was an early moving image parlor device. You spun it, and while looking through a slit, you saw still drawings come to life and move in much the same way as a child’s flip book animates sequences of stick drawings.

  Coppola had a policy of screening student and local filmmakers’ work at the end of the day every Friday. People were encouraged to drop their film off for these after-hours screenings. My film was not done yet, but I had a silent work print that I could show, so I had left it at Zoetrope Studios.

  My film was made up of rare black-and-white still photos and even scarcer motion picture footage of Johnson, all of which I had located through painstaking research and contacting film and photo collections all over the world. The story centered on Johnson’s winning the Heavyweight Championship of the World and then going on to defeat the much-admired white ex-champion, Jim Jeffries. The Jeffries loss to a black man caused race riots across the country, and the movie footage of the fight itself was declared illegal. Also, Johnson was later arrested. So my film had rare and powerful stuff, and it made an impression.

  Soon I was meeting with Francis and getting a tour of his studio. George was somewhere there finishing his film. This was before The Godfather and before the release of George’s first feature, THX 1138, which was also to be the first release of a multiple-studio film deal that had financed the Zoetrope studio. Coppola had also directed, but his claim to fame was winning the Oscar in 1970 for coauthoring the movie Patton with Edwin North, though no one ever remembers North, just Coppola. North had written The Day the Earth Stood Still and Young Man with a Horn, among many other films. According to the producer of Patton, John McCarthy, “Coppola’s script was effulgent, imaginative, airy, really awful good, but in need of some restructuring. We lined up North . . . He took the Coppola script and worked it to the point where it had more cohesion and hung together better, and had a much more workable dramatic structure.” Just for the record, dramatic structure is everything in movie stories.

  Francis told me he liked my project and asked how he could help me. I said I needed a place to edit. His studio had all the latest in movie technology, and young filmmakers were drooling to get their hands on it; so was I. “Why don’t you come and work for us?” he said. Now, that was a bombshell I hadn’t expected. It was all very vague, but essentially I could work for them and finish my film as well. There were guys I knew who would have walked from Los Angeles on a bed of nails for this opportunity, but I turned him down.

  I explained that I had just started a new job with another company, and I just couldn’t walk out on them so soon. He was taken aback, but what could he say? I was just some naive kid who hadn’t wised up yet. So he said that was very admirable of me.

  Then he explained why he had originally called me in. He said his friend Martin Ritt was directing the motion picture version of The Great White Hope and my film would be a perfect short to run before the picture. He would call Martin and see what could be worked out. “Oh, and by the way,” he said, “you can still edit your film here.” And I did, but Ritt told Coppola he was too far along to include my movie.

  I brought in my film and went to work. I still had a full-time job, but nights and weekends I was working away at Zoetrope Studios. Soon I started to notice something strange. They had all this fancy stuff, a trendy old brick warehouse with all the latest flatbed editing machines imported from Europe. They had huge black-and-white blowups of famous movie scenes and film directors (that would later find their way to ILM). They had the best carpet and office furniture that money could buy, and a huge old-fashioned espresso machine topped by a gold eagle. It was designed to impress and it did. Except there was one problem: All the little stuff you need to edit a movie, they didn’t have. No tape at all, no splicers for cutting film, no supplies of any kind. OK, I thought. I guess everyone just brings their own stuff. And that is what I did.

  Within months, THX 1138 was released and it dropped dead. The studio hated the film and all the other projects Coppola had lined up. They cut off all money and even made Francis repay what had been spent. Zoetrope vanished from the landscape (at least until The Godfather), but I still had a job and was able to finish my film, Jeffries-Johnson 1910. Now I knew why there were no supplies: They were broke and counting on the release of THX to save them.

  I entered my Jack Johnson film in the San Francisco International Film Festival and won a minor award, but they refused to show it, even though the opening festival feature was The Great White Hope. So a bunch of us local filmmakers, tired of being rejected every year, formed our own alternative festival and rented Fugazi Hall in North Beach, and my film was the feature of the evening. Coppola attended the S.F. Festival but then snuck out and came to ours, playing the tuba on the stage there, to the entertainment of everyone. We made Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle and embarrassed the stuffed shirts at the high-society festival that had ignored us.

  I picked up a good review from the Chronicle’s movie critic, Judy Stone, and got a distribution deal from McGraw-Hill Films. When I got my royalty advance check, I walked into a downtown bank and approached a pretty young teller. She looked at it and said in a breathless movie starlet’s voice, “Are you an author?” That’s when I knew I had made the right career choice. I was twenty-four years old.

  After my Jack Johnson movie, I tried to find grant money for the next documentary I wanted to make. The subject was Ulysses S. Grant, the famous Civil War general and president. I had read everything I could get my hands on about him, including his personal memoirs that had been published by Mark Twain. It was these memoirs that Gertrude Stein had instructed Ernest Hemingway to study if he wanted to learn how to write. Edmund Wilson compared them to Thoreau’s Walden and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It was these little-known aspects of this great man’s life that I wanted to bring to an audience’s attention by extracting them from the past. This project got me the chance at an internship with the American Film Institute, but I was unable to obtain the money to make the film, so it became an article called “Me and General Grant.”

  Hanging out at Zoetrope the little bit that I did had by now caused my thinking to change. Out of college I had thought that if I could just work somewhere in the movie business and still make films on the side, I would be perf
ectly happy. Now that I had seen what the really aggressive young filmmakers were doing, it made me wonder if I should change tactics. I could continue to beg for filmmaking grants or do what producers did, get control of a property and leverage that to get a movie made. I could still use my historical material, just in a larger crapshoot.

  Mike Medavoy

  By about 1974, I had become fascinated by the life of Willie Sutton, the notorious bank robber, the guy who when asked why he had robbed banks famously replied, “Because that’s where the money was.” I had read his autobiography and was determined to get a movie made about his life.

  Sutton was a very interesting guy. He was a bank robber but he was known as “The Actor” because he never used violence and the gun he carried was only what he called “a necessary prop.” He would use disguises such as police uniforms to gain entry to a bank before it opened. Once inside he would reveal something scary, like a machine gun, to make the employees freeze. It was safer that way. Willie knew any lesser gun might make people do something foolish, something off script.

  He would then go to the bank’s manager and introduce what he called “the psychological bribe.” Knowing that the manager would bravely refuse to open the safe when the time lock went off, Willie explained that the manager had a greater responsibility to protect his employees than the money. He was giving the man the excuse he needed to save face, but still open the safe. Willie was a brilliant man. What actor, I thought, wouldn’t want to play a character who used disguises, costumes, and acting skills to successfully rob banks?

  While I was trying to negotiate the rights to the book, I wrote a treatment called Willie: The Actor and I was also trying to interest Paul Newman, but with no luck. His agent told me Paul didn’t want to play any criminal types, which was pretty funny to me because he starred in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

  Desperate to find someone that would listen to me, I went to a talk at the San Francisco International Film Festival given by Mike Medavoy. Medavoy had been a Hollywood agent and later producer. At the time he was a big shot at United Artists.

  During his talk he answered several questions by local filmmakers about how to get an agent or break into movies. It was in response to these questions that he finally summed up by saying, “Look, your job as young filmmakers is to get in to see me. But of course, you can’t get in to see me.”

  He was presenting a sort of catch-22. It was like he was saying, “In order to get a job, you already have to have a job.” Well, I said to myself, I can get in to see him if that’s what it takes, and I set out with a plan.

  I flew down to Los Angeles and got a room at the Highland Gardens Motel, an old apartment house on Franklin. A lot of young actors and film people hung out there, and it was always a surprise to find that your “motel” room had a large kitchen and sometimes a couple of bedrooms. There was a pool, palm trees, the whole bit. Also, it was cheap and close to everything in Hollywood. This was where Janis Joplin OD’d on heroin in 1970. Room 105.

  My plan was to get onto the studio lot where Medavoy had an office, walk around until I found it, and try to either drop off my treatment or maybe even get in to see him, which I thought was unlikely.

  My first obstacle was getting onto the lot. There were security guards and a gatehouse. You had to have an appointment to enter, unless of course you worked there. I reasoned that the most important status symbol in Los Angles after your car was a parking space at an L.A. studio. I didn’t even want to attempt driving onto the lot. That was too bold; I would never make it. So I upped the ante and tried something even bolder.

  I figured all the studio hotshots—the young ones anyway, the ones with neither gray hair nor manners—were probably pretty rude to lowly folk like security guards. Plus, these guys might not have enough status yet for a private parking spot on the studio lot near the main offices. I had seen some of them walking on and off with their secretaries, probably going to and from lunch. They had suits and briefcases and their secretaries wore skirts. Security just watched them walk past.

  So I put on a suit, carried an empty briefcase, and had my girlfriend walk two steps behind me. When I got to the guardhouse, the guy started to ask me something and I gave him some arrogant bullshit and he just backed away. We were now inside the palace gates.

  We decided I should explore alone so as to arouse less suspicion. This was like a spy mission. When I finally found Medavoy’s office, I went in and talked to the secretary. Here was the lucky part. His regular secretary was off sick that day and this was a substitute, a fill-in that didn’t really know the protocol. I gave her my name and said I was here to see Mr. Medavoy. “I don’t see your name on this list,” she said. “There must be some mistake,” I answered back. She got flustered and decided she’d better do as I asked.

  She called Medavoy and said, “Mr. Kimberlin is here to see you.” He soon opened his office door and invited me in. He actually had his arm around my shoulders as we crossed into his lavish office with its oriental rugs and fine furniture. “How can I help you, Bill?” he asked. I went into my Willie Sutton movie pitch and handed him my script treatment. At this point Medavoy was acting a little confused. He didn’t know quite what was happening or who the hell I was, but he took my treatment and thanked me as he said good-bye at his door.

  I had been trying to snag an agent so I wouldn’t have to go through stuff like this anymore, so when I spotted a phone booth while crossing the studio lot, I popped inside, ready to call the agent one of my film professors had introduced me to. When I looked at the phone in the booth, it was just an empty shell, and I suddenly realized this was a studio prop, not a real phone booth. Hoping no one was watching my idiot move, I exited the fake booth and left the lot. The guards don’t care who leaves, so I disappeared back onto the Hollywood streets, looking for a real phone booth.

  I had always heard that while it was tough to get an agent, if you already had a sale, or at least a hot lead, most agents would gladly sign you to pick up an easy 10 percent. So I called an agent I had spoken to before. When I got him on the phone, I stupidly said, “I’m calling from Mike Medavoy’s office.” Just at that point my toll money dropped into the pay phone cash box with a clash and the agent said something like, “Does Mr. Medavoy use pay phones now?” “Well, I’m just outside on the street,” I replied. I don’t remember what he said next, but I think he said, “OK, I will check it out.”

  What a great day this had been, I thought. So my girlfriend and I headed off to the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a celebratory drink. One thing I should mention is that in those days when I was trying not to look so young and poor, I always left my callback number as the Beverly Hills Hotel. I used it like an office and messenger service. We ate at the lounge, hung out in the lobby, and made phone calls from there, but slept in the Highland Gardens on the cheap.

  While we were having dinner in the Polo Lounge, I noticed that someone at another table, who I couldn’t quite see, had asked that a phone be brought to his table. Of course, this was a time way before any kind of personal phone or cellphone.

  The Polo Lounge was not like other restaurants; it catered to Hollywood people making deals over meals. So each table was wired with a phone jack, and if you got a call or needed to make one, your waiter would just bring you a phone and plug it in for you.

  This was all new to me, and I was anxious to see who the important person was that had ordered the phone. When the man finally left his table, I saw who it was, even though I didn’t recognize him at first because he looked so different. It was Don King, the fight promoter, the guy with the wild hair who produced many a Muhammad Ali fight. Except there was no wild hair and he was dressed in a conservative suit. He looked like any other businessman. So, it was all hype and the press ate it up, making Don a very wealthy man. That’s show business.

  When I returned to my lobby office at the Beverly Hills Hotel the next
day, there was a message for me to call Mike Medavoy’s office. Great, I thought, now we’re getting somewhere.

  When I called the office, you’d think I had snatched the Lindbergh baby, as Truman Capote once said. They chewed me up one side and down the other. “We will never do business with you again, your script will be returned unread,” etc. It was the classic “you’ll never eat lunch in this town again” threat. But it scared the hell out of me. Here I was, a young film student type trying to hustle a deal, but I didn’t know what I was doing. There are no rules in that game, just what works, and this clearly hadn’t worked.

  Much later, I read that Steven Spielberg had bragged about doing much the same thing when he was coming up, except he had even moved into an empty studio office before he was found out.

  Panicked, I called my friend Don, who lived in Hollywood and had seen it all. What he said calmed me down a little. He asked, “Did you punch him?” “Are you crazy?” I said. “Of course not.” “You can’t be too aggressive in Hollywood, Bill,” he said. “Forget about it.” And I eventually did, but it took a while.

  I flew back to San Francisco with my tail between my legs, but I wasn’t done yet. My Jack Johnson documentary had gotten me an invitation to the American Film Institute (AFI). The institute was holed up in the old Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. Oilman Edward Doheny built the place for $3 million in 1928 for his son, who promptly shot himself. By the early 1970s the city owned it and leased it to the AFI for a dollar a year or something. A lot of young filmmakers hung out there at the time, either taking part in their film classes or attending talks by famous film directors from Harold Lloyd to John Huston. I never met him, but somewhere on the estate David Lynch, later the director of The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and the television drama Twin Peaks, was living in one of the old garages, trying to finish Eraserhead, his first feature.