Inside the Star Wars Empire

by Bill Kimberlin

  Chrissie and I walked back to the car together and I said, “I wouldn’t take this too seriously. I’m sure this guy pulls this crap at his Mercedes dealer when he doesn’t like the price.”

  Die Hard 2 had been budgeted at a cost of $42 million (a big number at the time), but it ballooned to $67 million. It was reported that when a Fox executive admonished Silver, the producer would reply, “Fuck you, slimeball.”

  Die Hard 2 grossed $240 million worldwide.

  The Players

  Dealing with Joel Silver was not the first time we had had problems with studio clients. It goes with the territory. With the 1986 film The Golden Child, staring Eddie Murphy, ILM started out on a good footing with the director, Michael Ritchie, and with the production company. At this point we were on a roll as the hottest effects company in the world. Although Hollywood resented anyone outside of Los Angeles, we were too important to ignore, so we had their grudging respect. That didn’t last long on this production.

  At first, they accepted everything we suggested with a “you’re the experts” attitude. But because the work was so difficult to pull off and was so slow in coming, the director gradually became unhappy with my supervisor, Ken Ralston, and ILM in general. In addition, it didn’t help that the other big movie we were working on at the time, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, was in trouble and Ken had been enlisted to helm both pictures at the same time. When Michael Ritchie found out, he became furious.

  Basically, for Golden Child we were to create a monster that the bad guy in the movie could turn into, and who Eddie Murphy could face in battle. Murphy had picked this project to try to expand the range of characters he could play.

  For one of our first production meetings, the Golden Child team flew up to ILM to confer with us. Here, we were to go over the storyboards and discuss how many expensive visual effects shots would be necessary to tell the story, how each would be shot, and in which shots we would need to see both the monster and Eddie. Sometimes we could suggest ways to eliminate shots, which was important because losing just one shot might save the production studio $200,000. This whole process was full of landmines for us, however, because while we wanted to please the director and give him what he wanted, the studio was the one paying the bills, so we had an obligation to them as well.

  We had to start the meeting without one major player, the producer, Edward S. Feldman. When he finally did arrive, he turned out to be an older gentleman who walked with a cane. He reminded me of the college professor I had in speech class, but he had a good story about why he was late. It seems that it was Feldman’s job to see that Eddie Murphy, who was at a high point in his career, had a house near the studio in Los Angeles that was suitable for a star.

  There are a lot of houses for rent in Hollywood or, more precisely, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and Holmby Hills. Some have been purchased by investors and are rented out between sales, and some are owned by people who move about the world and between houses as they work in the entertainment industry. These houses are listed in the back pages of industry trade publications like the Hollywood Reporter, especially the Friday edition. The rents on these places were astounding. Many mansions would go for $75,000 a month or more, and were the type that studios would rent for their stars, recording artists, or executives as temporary residences.

  Now, the house that Eddie wanted was the mansion that the musician Prince had recently been living in. But there was a problem. It seems that Eddie believed that Prince was a devil worshiper or into Satanism or something that looked like it, and Eddie, being a Catholic, refused to move into the mansion until the place could be cleansed.

  The only person qualified to do this kind of work was a Catholic priest so, Feldman says, “That’s why I was late. I was trying to find a priest that could do an exorcism on the house.” Welcome to Hollywood.

  When Murphy finally came up to ILM for his blue-screen shoot, he had a small black entourage with him and they all pretty much kept to themselves. He had a limo and his buddies had one as well. He had also brought a motor home for relaxing in between takes. None of this is unusual, of course, it was just that Eddie was very stiff and ill at ease. Even the director, Michael Ritchie, couldn’t seem to loosen him up, and Murphy had specifically chosen Ritchie as the director. I certainly didn’t expect Murphy to be funny.

  This reminded me of an account I had read of someone who was at Groucho Marx’s house while Groucho and all his comedian friends watched a new comic on television. The writer observed that while the TV comic was very funny, neither Groucho nor his buddies laughed. They would simply remark, “Now that, that was funny.” They were in total analyst mode. Not that all comedians are like that—there are exceptions. Jim Carrey and the late Robin Williams, for example, could be so “on” that you worried about them.

  Perhaps because ILM and Marin County are so lily-white, Eddie never really relaxed, let alone joked around. He did do some crew photos with some of our production assistants, but that was about all.

  But there is something else that is related to this standoffishness that has always surprised me about the movie business, and that is in what low esteem actors are sometimes held by the crew. Perhaps it is because the actors come in and do their bit and then leave their images and multiple takes with the directors, editors, and post-production crews who will have to work with this material, reviewing and re-reviewing it for months and months. Perhaps this causes an insensitivity to set in. The actors wear on you as you see the same scenes and hear the same lines over and over again. Hundreds of times. Thousands of times. You spend so much time in screening rooms wading through miles of these performances, oftentimes without the benefit of sound, that I suppose it is only natural for the subjects to become the butt of flip remarks. This is especially true if the crew senses what, in their minds, is phoniness or pretentiousness. Oddly, it is often the director who will either start it or egg it on.

  During Memoirs of an Invisible Man in 1992, another vehicle for a star—this time Chevy Chase—trying to break his stereotype, the actor was being insulted by the director, John Carpenter (at least behind his back). John kept saying that Chevy was a pussy. To me, Chase was good on camera, relaxed and funny. I thought he did a good job and his movie wasn’t half bad. But off-camera he was treated like a ditz for his posing and small tantrums. His wearing a toupee didn’t help either. Few actors escape this. Perhaps we in the movie trenches know too much. We know that actors are just people, with publicity agents. Only the true professionals seem to entirely escape these negative critiques from the crew.

  For example, when Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy were working on Cocoon in 1986 at ILM for the director and former child star Ron Howard, they commanded great respect. Certainly for their talent, but also for their unassuming naturalness that must have come from working in the theater—which is more of an actor’s medium than film and where the crew is more part of a team—for so many years. Also, I think we were all impressed to see these two relaxing and talking to bystanders and then instantly transforming themselves into their characters the moment the director said, “OK, let’s try one.” It was as if they just turned slightly and began performing exactly where they had left off, without missing a beat. It appeared so effortless and casual that it was hard to not be impressed.

  Also on Cocoon the atmosphere on the set was completely different. For starters, the director, Ron Howard, had been an actor for most of his life. Of course, he had been a child star, perhaps most well-known for his role as Opie on the old Andy Griffith television show, but he had survived the ending of his childhood acting career and resumed it as a young adult in, interestingly enough, American Graffiti, where he first worked with Lucas. His recollections on working with George on Graffiti are instructive. Apparently, George’s direction of actors was limited to instructions like “faster,” “slower,” or “that was great.” Ron went up to him and said, “Just tell us what you want. We�
��re actors, we can do it.” No small part of an actor’s success is working with a director who understands actors.

  When Ron showed up at ILM to work on Cocoon, he had already directed two hits, Grand Theft Auto (classic exploitation film) and Splash. I remember him bursting into my editorial department saying, “Where’s George?” He must have been proud to return as a successful director, and he was about to get a lot more successful with Cocoon.

  One evening Ron asked to book our small screening room so he could show his current Cocoon rough cut to his producers, Lily and Richard Zanuck. Richard had produced Jaws, The Sting, and The Sound of Music among many other major films and would next produce Driving Miss Daisy. In addition, his father was Daryl Zanuck, the legendary studio boss who ran 20th Century Fox for nearly 40 years. Richard’s wife, Lily, was a lot younger than Richard, but far from a trophy wife. She was an aggressive and talented producer in her own right. During breaks in shooting the effects for Cocoon on the main stage, we all ate a catered lunch together and I got a kick out of Lily’s encouraging Richard to tell stories about Hollywood in the old days. “He’s got a million of them,” she said with the glee of a kid wanting to hear the same bedtime stories over and over. I didn’t doubt that this man, whose famous father had once fired him and had him thrown off the studio lot, had great stories to tell but it was his unerring eye for the projects to pursue that impressed me. In the fast-buck world of Hollywood, what kind of producer decides to make a movie about old people (Cocoon) and then another movie about a black chauffer and an even older woman (Driving Miss Daisy)? A great producer, that’s what kind. Richard and Lily picked up the Best Picture Oscar for Daisy.

  Usually directors are a little nervous about showing their films before they are done, but in this case Ron was happy for anyone to take a peek. I sat in on the screening for Richard and Lily, and it was easy to tell this was a good movie. The acting was great, and the story just flowed.

  You can learn a lot by watching a film that doesn’t have all the final polish yet. With most really good films you start to watch and learn, but pretty soon you are pulled in and you get caught up in it, and the next thing you know, it’s over. With an unfinished film or sometimes even a bad film, there is less chance it will mesmerize you and you’ve got a chance to examine it and see how the machinery is working. The few times I have taught a class in filmmaking (at San Francisco State University and S.F. City College), I had the students watch the famous scene in the original Godfather where Michael, the war hero, explains how the family can kill McCluskey, the corrupt police captain. I had them watch that scene silent so they could see how the director, Francis Coppola, uses a long, slow dolly shot all the way across the room to end with a big close-up of Michael’s face just as he finishes his speech with “then I’ll kill them both.” The dialogue is great, but the big dramatic punch is all the more effective when it is set up just right. Watching that scene without sound and then listening to it without the picture is one way to get just enough detachment to learn something.

  Watching this rough cut of Cocoon, I couldn’t tell that Ron Howard was going to go on to be a major director, but I could see he was a bright kid with an infectious sense of how much fun this all was, making movies. I also knew that Richard Zanuck, his producer, had mentored and protected Steven Spielberg on Jaws when the going got rough and the mechanical shark they were using in the water off Martha’s Vineyard wouldn’t work half the time. Richard called the studio and said, “If I see one studio Learjet set down in Martha’s Vineyard, I will shut the production down.” That is how a good producer protects his director and the project. Richard knew just how to deal with the powerful at the studio: threaten their profits.

  What Do You Do?

  My fellow editors and I used to joke about people coming to work for Lucasfilm as being “rescued.” You could make good money there as opposed to almost any other outside job. You could get promoted and move higher on the salary scale. You could buy a house and many did, especially when it became apparent that if you were asked back on new pictures, this job wasn’t going to end anytime soon. Directors were lining up to get our “secret sauce” of visual effects that would set their movies apart from the rest.

  Yet, what was I involved in here? It was an exciting place to work, at least in the early days, because for the first time I was in a situation where there seemed to be no limits as to where I could go. There was a time when just mentioning that you worked at Lucasfilm would get you a job interview. Yet I wasn’t in command of the ship anymore. When I worked at Palmer’s, there was time to pursue other things. I had made two films while working there, and both got distribution. My Grandfather Mason had admonished his sons, “Don’t ever work for anybody. Work for yourself.”

  There is a line in the movie The Misfits (written by Arthur Miller) that is bantered about by several characters regarding roping wild horses that will become dog food: “It’s better than wages. Anything is better than wages.” You could lose your soul taking a job. I had seen it many times. It was a dangerous thing, especially if the money was good. You could get caught as a waiter, say, making $300 a night in tips and get used to the easy money and not be able to give it up. Then you wake up one day and that is what you are, a waiter. I kept asking myself, am I doing that? Am I just a glorified waiter?

  I had known guys that had it even worse. Their job became their identity. It was the first question asked when meeting someone at a social gathering: “What do you do for a living?” It was epidemic. Once you took that job, you were an employee. America had become an entire nation of employees. I used to think, what’s going to happen to these people if they lose their jobs? They think they are safe, but they are not. They’ve got a house and a car and a family. Everything depends on that job now.

  But of course there was a downside to any artistic lifestyle that was perfectly expressed in the old joke, “What do you call an artist without a girlfriend? Homeless.” When I was hustling to make my own films after college, my friends all talked about it. How long can we go on doing this before we can’t anymore? How many years are we going to give ourselves to “make it” before we have to admit that it’s never going to happen? And then what? It was scary to contemplate being forty years old with no career and a thin résumé. I remember the words of Mario Puzo who, after a life of failure as a minor novelist, became a best-selling author with his book and movie deal for The Godfather. A reporter asked him how it felt and he said, “It’s like finding out you don’t have to die.”

  As a guy trying to be a filmmaker, I was neither the first nor the last to waddle through this dilemma. Everyone has to find their own path. I had taken what little I knew about my family and used it as a model. As a doctor, my father worked for himself. My aunt and uncle owned and ran a summer resort. They were not employees, they could not be laid off. They could go bankrupt, but you couldn’t fire them. Was even a part of this still possible?

  I thought back to my old landlords the Agneses, who owned apartment buildings. If a person could get their name on some California real estate deeds, that might just do it. So I started working on this as a backup plan while I was still hustling to make films and write. William Faulkner had said that the best job he was ever offered was to become a manager in a brothel. In his opinion, it was the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.

  Then I got “rescued.” I was pulled into a world that was moving so fast that there was little time for such niceties as your own life. This was more like a battlefield environment. There were generals to encourage advancing, nurses to comfort the wounded, and a firing squad for deserters. Veterans guided the new troops and recounted their past victories under George, the supreme commander and benevolent dictator. Success was our narcotic; box office and Oscars our goal. We also tried to make the coolest-looking stuff we could come up with.

  Yet I was always looking for a side business or backup plan as insurance against the fickle natu
re of filmmaking, where you are essentially fired every Friday. Ever since 1973 when I did my first land lease deal, I had started becoming obsessed with real estate. I drove around with real estate option contracts in my glove box, just in case I saw the right property. I bought all the books and studied the tax advantages. Double declining depreciation schedules, expenses to offset income taxes from salary income, investment leverage ratios, property tax caps—I learned it all.

  Real estate investing has many stories of missed opportunities. The best advice I ever got was this admonition: “The profit is made in the purchase, not the sale.” That may sound counterintuitive but it’s just another way of saying, “Buy low, sell high.” I did a few deals but I ultimately decided I would rather make a movie than repair broken plumbing, at least for the moment. Still, there was one property that got away that annoys me yet. It was on Washington street in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights district. Three four-bedroom flats for $119,000. That building today is worth at least $7 million.

  The Oracle

  At the center of everything was Oracle. It was the Lucasfilm database system, and in 1982 Oracle was my introduction to computers. It was a Unix-based system that was probably mounted on Sun Microsystems servers that linked the entire company, from the Los Angeles offices such as the Egg Company (George naming things again) to all the divisions in Marin County, where the bulk of the company was located. Oracle was clunky and occasionally went down, temporarily paralyzing us, but it was also powerful. You could ask it for all of the X-wing fighter aircraft shots with pilots looking left, for instance, and it would immediately produce a list. Wow.