Inside the Star Wars Empire

by Bill Kimberlin

  We also had e-mail that connected everyone, something the general population wouldn’t be familiar with for another decade. Added to that was a companywide electronic billboard we called allmessages. It was our personal internet before there was an Internet. Working here was sometimes like seeing into the future. One could extrapolate these things to their logical conclusions.

  We already had computer-controlled camera systems that allowed our spaceship models, for instance, to be filmed multiple times, each time producing a separate strip of film that highlighted a different detail of the ship. Since all of these strips of film were identical, they could be composited together, yet with each part being individually controllable in terms of exposure or color. There would be the ship itself as one element, then its running lights, engine glow, laser cannon fire, whatever you wanted, all as easily manipulable parts. Want the engines brighter but not the spaceship? Done.

  By 1984 someone in the optical department had brought in a Macintosh personal computer to keep track of his work, and over in the computer division the guys were producing the first entirely computer-generated shot for the film Young Sherlock. It was an effect that could not be achieved using traditional methods. A stained glass window depicting a knight in armor comes to life, with the knight leaping out of the window to threaten a passing priest.

  Sometime after this shot was produced, I projected John Lasseter’s Luxo Jr. for the Pixar team in the Building D screening room. It had more than technology going for it. John had created a character with which the audience could empathize. This was a Luxo lamp that had feelings. There was no sound yet with these computer-generated images, and perhaps that is why they brought to mind for me the pathos that Charlie Chaplin’s silent films could evoke. This was a marker for me—something had just happened.

  It was at about this time I went home and said to my wife that the world had changed and now “the code was king.” She always reminds me that I had that insight early on. Computer code and programming languages were the new “means of production.” The San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived, was about to explode with a new kind of intellectual property, written in code. I felt like a bystander, but at least I saw it coming. My wife eventually became a computer programmer and built me a number of websites for my various interests, some of which actually make money.

  I’ve always had lots of interests. Movies, real estate, writing, photography, collecting books, Hollywood history—it’s a long list but the core of it finds me trying to learn and make a commentary record of the world I live in. It’s not a new or uncommon act; man’s earliest known efforts of recording the times in which he lived were cave paintings about 30,000 years ago.

  There are libraries full of information, but it always seemed to me that documents about how things really were are scarce—at least unfiltered ones. However insightful, novels are fiction, filtered through the writers’ biases. History books are distillations from research, and most of the rest are sponsored works shaded by politics or commercial interests. This leaves journals, diaries, realistic paintings, photographs, audio recordings, artifacts, and documentary movies as some of the few sources of reality-based accounts, as reasonably reliable records of civilization.

  Three of these have always fascinated me: photographs, documentary films, and travel journals from Charles Dickens’s to John Steinbeck’s. Of course, none of these are unbiased, but your expectation is that the author is recounting the truth as he sees it, and you are free to accept or reject it—not a choice one can ordinarily make with a work of art. With art, the whole point is to accept its message as artistic truth. That’s why we talk about and accept “artistic license.” I appreciate art mostly because it can give us insight into ourselves, not because it is a record.

  Faulkner wrote, “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion . . . so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again.” I take photographs, make documentaries, and write in the hope of freezing just one tiny moment in the river of time that continues to wash over us all. What other choice is there besides painting on the cave wall, just as our ancestors did? Paint in the hope that what we paint will help those that come after us to better understand us and themselves.

  The Smell of Napalm

  In the early days, the Building D screening room was the real workhorse of the company because it was where we held most dailies. After the Ranch was built, we inherited the Building C screening room as well, which had been originally designed as a sound mixing theater. Because C was the elegant one, I wanted to call it “Graceland” and D, the lowly workroom, “Jonestown.” That was never approved, partially because it was a dig at our obsessive postproduction supervisor who was named Jones and also because his female assistant was an Elvis fan who considered it an insult to his memory or something. I was never sure how calling it “Graceland” insulted a rock star who died of an overdose, but in any case I did have the projectionist play the Paul Simon song “Graceland” occasionally as people were being seated there.

  Both of these screening rooms were “hot miked” so the projectionists could hear instructions from the directors and supervisors as to what they wanted projected. By this I mean that they had “live” microphones in the theaters so that anything said in the room could be heard in the projection booth. This gave the potential of conversations being inadvertently overheard, either because we all forgot that we were on an open mike (which was easy to do) or because clients hadn’t been in the rooms before and didn’t know they were being heard. One time I inadvertently overheard a married couple, who were two of the biggest producers in Hollywood, talking alone in the D theater. They were eating sandwiches and waiting for us to screen their dailies, when she said to him, “Do you remember when we were poor?”

  In addition to the mikes, I thought it would save a lot of time if I installed a video camera that looked directly at the projection screen so I could watch on a monitor in my office as the various dailies occurred throughout the day. In this way I could also continue working until my shots came up in dailies and were starting to be discussed. Once I had this installed, various members of management insisted that they have monitors in their offices as well. There was no reason for them to have monitors, but it became a power thing.

  Now I had a tricky political problem on my hands. This idea could save the company hundreds, perhaps thousands, of work hours lost to employees sitting in dailies waiting for their shots to come up for discussion, if we could give them all monitors like I had. Yet coincidently at the same time, the screening rooms started to be used by our artists to draw live nude models. All of a sudden, the models were being broadcast. I don’t think anyone else ever knew that this happened, but soon I was able to show the artists how to shut off the system while they were working and all was well again, at least for a while.

  About this time I realized that these projection rooms had become more than places to study our work—they had become gathering places for union meetings, drama clubs, and lectures, as well as the artists. Occasionally I would find someone sleeping there after having worked all night. Then once we started using video projection as well as film projection, the rooms were where we all watched special presentations like the Oscars broadcasts that almost always included some of our colleagues. Both rooms were jammed to watch the verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder trial. In a way it was our commons, our public space. Even George got involved.

  A few of us were film buffs and occasionally we would use the theaters to run a classic film after work and invite either the director or cinematographer to talk about the film with us. We screened Easy Rider and asked László Kovács, its cinematographer, to speak about shooting it. He said he almost turned down the film because he had already shot so many motorcycle pictures, but Dennis Hopper talked him into it by just telling him the story, which László said sounded like a Greek tragedy. We could only get people who were up from Los Angeles, or out from N
ew York, and happened to be working with us on some project. I always wanted to get a writer but never ran into one.

  George came down for our American Graffiti screening, and I asked him if he had any nostalgia for the great low-light cinematography of his movie. It had been shot in what was called Techniscope, which divides each frame into two horizontal frames, saving money on film stock but adding some grain. Essentially it was an innovative way to shoot a wide-screen movie on a small budget and get a great look. This screening was at a time when George was pushing the Hollywood film world to go digital. His answer was that he wasn’t primarily known for his cinematography and he was fine with the look he could get with digital. It was a disappointing answer for me. It did make sense, but did it make art? George had famously turned down Vilmos Zsigmond as the cinematographer of one of his Star Wars movies because “the guy wants a million bucks.”

  Eventually management asked me to shut the video cameras down and I did. It must be some kind of law of human nature that when things are being recorded, whether by White House taping systems or bystander police videos, things are revealed. I saw it early and now we are apparently all going to see it for quite a while with the current police actions caught on digital video.

  I did, however, finally get to have a writer come speak to us, just in a more roundabout way. We were working on some shots for the movie Red Dawn (1984) and I met a character with an even wider a range of interests than my own. We were scheduled to screen dailies for director John Milius after lunch. John is a legend in the movie business as a screenwriter, director, and notable character. He had written Apocalypse Now for Francis Coppola, including the classic line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” not to mention having inspired the character John Milner in American Graffiti. Steven Spielberg had called him “the greatest hood-of-a-car screenwriter I ever met.” He rode with the fastest guns in Hollywood. At one point all the top directors were his friends and admirers and, as far as I know, they still are. John was the kind of personality that could build strong bonds with people. He was about friendship, loyalty, and talent.

  Not that everyone agreed with him or his right-leaning politics—it was just that he was such a genuine person, his flamboyant statements could be understood as simply his passion for the reality of history. He understood the Roman warrior and the Japanese samurai better than anyone else in movies. He collected and reveled in shotguns and other weaponry. In some ways, he was a man out of time. In liberal Hollywood, to be on the national board of directors of the NRA could make for difficult cocktail party conversations in Beverly Hills mansions, but he managed it and I saw why when he suddenly and unexpectedly appeared in our editorial department. Directors didn’t usually travel around a studio without an entourage, but Milius did.

  The huge black-and-white photos that I used to see hanging from the brick walls in the old warehouse location of American Zoetrope had migrated to our facility in Marin. The optical department had the best two. One was a great still from Flash Gordon and the other was from Citizen Kane. The lobby of Building C had the giant ape busting through the gates in King Kong. In editorial, we had Akira Kurosawa holding a samurai sword and, behind my editing bench, Sergei Eisenstein holding film up to the light during editing.

  Milius was the kind of guy who could have expounded on any of the topics suggested by these photos, from King Kong to Eisenstein. In other words, he could give you three or four minutes, even a half-hour lecture, right on the spot about something suggested in the photos.

  I have only known one other person that could do that, and he was a land surveyor I had met while looking for country property. He could give you an overview of almost any subject. One time he went over the Peloponnesian Wars with me while we were having coffee.

  Milius reminded me of the surveyor. John was just brimming with information, and the topic he chose was the samurai sword that Kurosawa held in the large photo on our wall. As an expert on weaponry, he was careful to note that he was not speaking about real samurai swords, which he could have easily done, but how replicas were made for the movies. How they faked them to look real and yet not endanger the actors. Since fakery was our business, we of course listened.

  In making movies there are practical effects, like breakaway bottles for hitting barroom cowboys over the head in Westerns, and special visual effects, used in making movie dinosaurs. There is sometimes crossover between the two, but John was telling us about a unique type of movie prop used to pull off practical effects that could be used on set without additional help from us. He knew a lot about these swords and could make it interesting.

  The part that impressed me was that here was a famous screenwriter and sometime movie director that was both a colleague and personal friend to Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Francis Coppola, George Lucas, and all of the rest of the top people in Hollywood, and we were, the goofballs at the bottom of the movie food chain. Yet for some reason he is hanging out with us for the afternoon. Milius seemed to me the very embodiment of the creative character. Like Eugene O’Neill or Ernest Hemingway, he was all about artistic emphasis. He magnified the fine details of life into art.

  We finally got him into the Building D screening room by enticing him with a take-out hamburger from Foodles, a poor imitation of a restaurant near us that I avoided whenever possible. I was hoping that while the hamburger might be bad, it was not likely to injure him. So we brought the lights down and projected the shots we had been working on. After about ten minutes of sitting in the dark watching the film, we heard John’s voice from the back of the theater, “This may be the greatest hamburger I ever ate in my life.”

  I didn’t learn any screenwriting secrets from him, but just talking to John was inspiration enough to confirm that I was in an exciting business where anyone might walk in the door. Some that did were Michael Jackson (wearing a surgical mask), Sylvester Stallone (who is surprisingly short, maybe five foot eight or so), Tom Cruise (who may be a little nuts, but is also a savvy producer), Susan Sarandon (who threw a fit during her FX makeup session for Witches of Eastwick), Akira Kurosawa (dignified), Mick Jagger’s daughter (who wanted to try out film editing), and many others I’ve forgotten.

  Roger Rabbit

  By the time Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) came along, I had been head of ILM editorial for a while. I supervised the other effects editors, their assistants, negative cutters, projectionists, screening rooms, and our film archives as well as our commercial editorial department. We were the nerve center of the company. Everything passed through us.

  Disney had brought us the Roger Rabbit project to be directed by Bob Zemeckis, and it was a monster. Every shot in the movie was either full animation or live action with animated characters interacting with the actors in an otherwise conventional movie. The scope of this project was so large that it was scheduled to take a full two years to complete. It was grueling but was also probably the most fun project I ever worked on.

  Zemeckis had been all set to direct Cocoon until a disastrous screening of his first major directing effort, Romancing the Stone. Making a movie is an ongoing creative process, and you don’t really know what you have until you are done. Apparently the Romancing screening for the studio didn’t go all that well. However, when his movie was finally released to audiences, it was a big hit and this success allowed him to direct Back to the Future, which was so successful that it spawned sequels, some of which I worked on. Now he could do anything he wanted and he chose Roger Rabbit.

  There was precedent for a movie of this type from both Disney and MGM but not at this scale. An entire feature film was unprecedented. The earlier films just had a short sequence of, for instance, Jerry from the Tom and Jerry cartoons dancing with Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh or Julie Andrews dancing with cartoon penguins in Mary Poppins. Both of these had used dance numbers and locked-down cameras that could be meticulously timed so that animators could draw the cartoon characters to see
mingly interact with the live action. Roger was going to require shooting an entire movie with every scene plotted for the actor to be moving and looking in the exact right way so that months later the animators could hand-draw their characters to completely integrate with the movie story. No one had ever tried to do anything with this complexity, and to top it off, this was going to be a major studio investment in an animated character that no one had ever heard of before.

  Considering all of these unknowns, the producers, both Disney and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, elected to pay ILM to do some tests to prove that this concept could actually work. Again, Ken Ralston and I worked together on this project, Ken as the director of special effects and I as his editor.

  Ken designed two tests with the idea of making the animators’ tasks so hard that if they could pull it off, the movie could be made. We called the two scenes RR1 and RR2.

  In RR1 Ken played Roger’s neighbor, and when the goofy rabbit comes by to mooch a cup of coffee, Ken becomes so angry he stuffs Roger into the coffee cup. RR2 was much more elaborate. It involved Jessica Rabbit’s live-action car, Roger, and a dark alleyway. This created all kinds of animation challenges. Roger would have to be animated walking through the headlight beams of a real car, going behind glass, being reflected in mirrors, and appearing in a dark shadowy alley under the illumination of a swinging lamp, all the while interacting with Jessica and a stand-in actor representing Bob Hoskins, who was to be the human star. Just to make the animation job even more difficult, Ken had the camera moving as if this were a conventional movie.

  We shot the scenes on VistaVision film, made eight-by-ten B&W still enlargements of the hundreds of frames where Roger or Jessica appeared, pin-registered them so they would conform to animation tables, and shipped the whole batch off to Disney to see if they could animated it.