Inside the Star Wars Empire

by Bill Kimberlin

  Knowing that the hotel had recently undergone a $240 million restoration, we joked about who could possibly afford such an extravagance as to own a place like this. I was soon to find out.

  I had been struggling for some time with what the definition of success was for me. Surely, having a trophy hotel such as this in your portfolio was the epitome of success in America. Yet, there was a flaw here. F. Scott Fitzgerald called it “the consoling proximity of millionaires.” Now they were billionaires and I was working for them, but my question was, could I consort and not be tainted? Could I maintain my own goals and not adopt theirs? Or, on the contrary, should I adopt theirs—with enough money you could do what you wanted, couldn’t you? Marcia Lucas once said, “When you get a big jolt of money, it’s very easy to be in awe of it and lose touch with reality.” I was in no danger of getting such a jolt, but still I think we all wonder what it would be like.

  We walked along the narrow oceanfront road that separates the hotel from the water until we reached some of the private homes that also face the ocean. Because these large houses were few in number, they were obviously expensive. But it was the last one on the block that intrigued me. It was on a massive lot maybe three to five acres in size and looked as if Jay Gatsby might have lived there once. It was old but restored to leave a magnificent period look, or so I thought. There were second-story terraces, a long loggia and reflecting pond, covered walkways leading to a huge swimming pool and pool house, and acres of lawns and palm trees all facing the ocean.

  Rather than walk back to the Biltmore the same way we had come, we thought we might get a better look by walking down the street behind this magnificent house. The mansion’s property ended at a side road and there was nothing else beyond, other than an old and somewhat creepy cemetery half hidden in the trees. Was this where Santa Barbarians buried their dead? It looked like it. As we turned down the road behind the old house, there was a substantial wall with a giant set of iron gates preventing entry; otherwise some latter-day William Holden / Sunset Boulevard type might have swung his car in for hiding on the ample property: “I had landed myself in the driveway of some big mansion . . . the kind crazy movie people built in the crazy twenties. A neglected house gets an unhappy look. This one had it in spades.”

  But the strangest thing was the gates themselves. They were a marvel of ironwork but there was no latch on them. A small space separated each gate from the other when closed, but nothing else. There was no mechanism for opening them, no rod or gear or mechanics of any kind that revealed how they could possibly open. There was no speaker box for stating your case for seeking entry, no push buttons to tap in a code. It was a puzzle. We discussed this curious matter as we walked along the high wall only to find yet another identical set of gates. Here I think I even got down on my knees to more closely examine them.

  About this time a very polite man in a nice suit appeared on the other side of the gate. Was this the gateman? I had observed that there appeared to be some kind of smaller house back about fifty feet from the gates and almost hidden. I asked him how the gates worked, and perhaps because he was bored he told us. Buried beneath the ground of each gate was a machine that operating through gears, was powerful enough to pivot the gates open from the stanchion on which each side hung.

  To the question I had been thinking about since our joking around on the Biltmore patio garden as to who could afford such a thing, I was unable to phrase it delicately enough for him to answer. All he said was “just another millionaire.” He reminded me of Raymond, the butler in Citizen Kane: All he knew was that Kane died holding the snow globe. But there was one more thing he did say. When I asked about the old mansion on the property, he said, “It was built six years ago from the ground up.” Just like the gates, it was all a deception. This was no restoration of a fine old Santa Barbara home. It was like one of our movie sets, a new house that only appeared old. We thanked him and walked back to the hotel to get the car and go to dinner, but I needed to find out whose house this was because it was awfully tempting to be in awe of it or afraid of it.

  It turned out that there was a man wealthy enough to own both the estate with the fancy gates and the Biltmore Hotel. He also owned the Sand Piper Golf Club, among numerous other resorts and businesses in town. He owns the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City and, as expected, is a billionaire. And what great American fortune resides behind those mansion walls?

  He was the inventor of Beanie Babies. Ty Warner had worked in the toy business and decided to invent his own toy based on something he had seen in Europe. Using a strategy of deliberate scarcity, he was able to build his fortune on the beanbag-like toy. So the mogul I had imaged was real enough. It was possible to own a fabulous hotel with your own private cottage on the grounds, and an oceanfront mansion within walking distance.

  It had all been so wonderfully deceptive. The old mansion that wasn’t old. The owner who had created a toy fad big enough to make him a billionaire. It was like a setting fit for a hard-boiled detective story, but what was the moral? Perhaps it was like the lesson I learned from a newspaper article I once saved just because it was so intriguing.

  In the gravel driveway to an old mansion in the Oakland Hills, not far from San Francisco where I was living at the time, a neighbor had spotted an elegant ladies’ high-heel shoe that appeared be discarded. Alarmed, she called the police, who found the elderly lady occupant of the mansion had been murdered by someone who ransacked the house and must have dropped the shoe from their loot as they escaped.

  I followed up on the article and learned that the victim was the widow of the man who invented the mechanical rabbit found at dog tracks. The key to this invention was to keep the rabbit tantalizingly within reach, but moving just that much faster than the dogs could run. It was diabolical, except that if you were a dog, you didn’t know. In life, of course, that makes all the difference, knowing. When I see people racing to work, I often ask myself, do they know? Do they know that there is no rabbit?

  Had it all been in that 1960s song by Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit,” about the dangers in chasing rabbits when you know you’re going to fall?

  Had I found the rabbit or just the hole? Santa Barbara, the Biltmore, the Beanie Babies mansion? This was the closest I had yet come to confronting the great American sorting process, which creates the haves and the have-nots. The mansion could have belonged to the owner of an aluminum siding empire or a plumbing supply magnate, or Gatsby. After all, this was America. But is it just our zip codes and birth certificates that control our destiny? Maybe I was reading too much Raymond Chandler, but it made me ask myself when I was going “to give the wasp’s nest a wallop” instead of being sucked in by the worlds I was observing. I wasn’t ready yet, but I had a plan. I would still work, but perhaps I could be less desperate about it all now that I had looked the rabbit in the eye.

  The Mask

  Jim Carrey starred in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Dumb and Dumber, and The Mask. But when he and his costar, an obscure actress, came to ILM to shoot their effects scenes for The Mask (1994), nothing had been released yet, so he was an unknown commodity in motion pictures. Ace Ventura was finished, but no one had seen it yet. In fact, the studio was squabbling about his salary for The Mask, and they weren’t too happy about the film’s budget at $18 million either.

  I would wander out to the big blue-screen stage where they were shooting once in a while, and Carrey was just kind of hanging out between takes. My ILM producer for this show was a guy named Goldman and he was fairly obnoxious. I think even he would agree that he was obnoxious. After Jim got a load of this guy, he started to mimic him, and it was both funny and uncanny to see. We were getting a glimpse of a comedic star that would explode onto the world stage in just months.

  Jim’s costar was, it was rumored, a former model and director Chuck Russell’s girlfriend. That didn’t sound good. This is the kind of stuff that floats around movie se
ts. It doesn’t have to be true, it’s just something to pass the time while waiting for the crew to light the next shot. It turns out that this “model” was Cameron Diaz, who this movie would introduce to the world as a star, a position she holds to this day.

  Somehow I was allowed a video copy of the film in rough cut, and I took it home and watched it. Carrey was goofy funny as a shy bank teller, and Diaz was mesmerizing as the love interest. Talent was just leaking out of this thing, and even with just storyboards cut in where our shots would go, it was a remarkable comedy, except for one thing. The story gimmick was that the milquetoast Carrey character had found a mask that gave him supernatural powers when he put it on. But the movie opened with a kind of prologue where pirates land on a sandy beach and bury a cursed mask they believe brings evil to its owner. We did a couple of shots for the director in the sequence, but in the end he simply chopped the whole opening off and released the movie without it. Wise decision. Here was a lesson in story: Don’t start at the beginning, start in mid-story. Write an introduction if you must, but then lop if off. You will rarely miss it.

  Probably the craziest character at ILM who worked on this picture, and there were many candidates, was Steve “Spaz” Williams. They called him “Spaz” because he was anything but—like that huge kid in high school that everyone called “Tiny.” He was a fairly big guy that rode a Harley and had a tattoo, but the interesting thing was that he had something I had never seen before. He was a creative artist type who also had high math, science, and computer skills. Things are somewhat different now, but back in the early 1990s most artists and writers that you met were somewhat computer-phobic. Not Spaz—he would do the original animation test of a dinosaur running through a field that convinced Spielberg to do all of Jurassic Park in computer-generated images. Spaz was goofy, sincere, highly talented, mischievous, and naive all rolled into one Harley-riding package.

  He hung out in what we called “The Pit,” which was an old sound recording room in the sub-basement of the glorious Art Deco–like C theater. It had no windows and was soundproof and was now filled with computer screens, empty beer cans, cigar butts, and trash bins filled with empty Styrofoam take-out food containers. Somewhat of an insomniac, Spaz would goof around all day and then work all night building beautiful and sometimes breakthrough computer animations. He had done the water creature in The Abyss and the chrome villain in Terminator 2, both for the director Jim Cameron.

  For The Mask Spaz did all of the crazy Chuck Jones / Tex Avery–like animations Jim Carrey goes through, with the bulging eyes that pop two feet out of Carrey’s head as his animated jaw drops to a table top with a thud.

  Wearing a “wife beater” T-shirt under a leather jacket, you were apt to find Spaz in his living room dismantling his Harley-Davidson motorcycle or at the gun range shooting rifles, shotguns, or pistols from his armory-like gun collection—all of this being in service of studying life from the inside out. Michelangelo dissected human corpses to find out how the body worked so he could draw it realistically. Spaz was dissecting life to find out what lay beneath so he could create the living, breathing computer-generated characters he was always building.

  The bad boy came out one evening at the Ranch. Basically, employees from divisions other than the Ranch were free to come out for lunch during the daytime. There was a restaurant in the recreation building that was mostly hamburgers, sandwiches, and salads. The other restaurant was in the main house. It had an actual chef and was usually where George ate. It was very informal and relaxed, but it did have sit-down meals with waiter service, complete with a dessert menu. This whole main house floor was open to employees and their guests. Below this level were film editing rooms for whatever project George might be working on. This area was somewhat private, but I would visit fellow editors there all the time. This downstairs level had a small but elegant screening room with walls of gorgeous old-growth redwood reclaimed from early railroad bridges and such. The seats were plush dark-red velvet and the fixtures were brass. The whole building was threaded with fiber optics because we could see that coming.

  The library was perhaps my favorite because I am a library hound, as I read a lot and I’m always doing research for something. It became especially interesting to me after George decided to purchase the Paramount research library. Want to know what the interior of a barbershop looked like in the 1920s? They had boxes of photos for just this kind of reference. If you are making a historical picture, this is just the kind of material you need access to. I love all that stuff and it was fun to go through it; no one else was much interested if they weren’t on a production.

  The second floor up from the living and dining room areas was off-limits to employees and guests. That is where George has his office and writing room, as well as whatever other staff he needed. I was almost never on the second floor.

  Sometime in 1990 we were working on Terminator 2 for director Jim Cameron, and Spaz was one of the lead guys creating breakthrough effects. We also had a new vice president in charge of several divisions, Scott Ross. Scott thought of himself as a hipster. He had a background in music, stereo sales, and video postproduction. He was a bright guy and very ambitious. He wanted to run Lucasfilm, which constantly put him at odds with his Harvard-educated, cardigan-sweater-wearing boss, Doug Norby, who did run Lucasfilm. Doug was square and conservative, like George, and Scott was cool and aggressive, like Hollywood.

  Scott got the idea for a speaker series and, using a stay at the Ranch as bait, lured an aging Timothy Leary to give a talk at ILM one evening, with a hosted dinner for a few select employees at the Ranch’s main house restaurant. I always thought that the company should have sponsored more talks, but not from “turn on, tune in” celebrants. We should have been hosting talks from Silicon Valley’s wide array of smart people, but we had no intellectual leadership, just hustlers.

  The Leary talk was standing room only at our C theater. What he brought to demonstrate was an erotic computer game called “Virtual Valerie.” It was the computer equivalent of a “peep show.” Besides that, Leary’s mind seemed shot. My girlfriend had heard him give a talk at the University of Michigan, where she was a philosophy major. Her critiques could be devastating. Leary, she said, embarrassed himself, and she thought his brain was addled even back then.

  When question-and-answer time came, I asked Leary why on the eve of the computer revolution’s opening whole new worlds for us, was he using it to sell soap? Worse than soap, soft-core porn? He kept thanking me for the question and responded that “after all, ILM has a commercial division.” To me he was a phony, but Scott was radiant and couldn’t wait for the Ranch dinner so he could hear celebrity gossip from the guy. I would not be attending, but Spaz would be.

  That night Spaz and his fellow computer hotshot, Mark Dippé, were among a select group at the first speaker series dinner at the Ranch main house. The details have always remained sketchy because neither the Ranch nor anyone else wanted to publicize what happened. During the dinner, Spaz and Mark wandered off, beers in hand, and decided to step over the velvet rope guarding the stairway to the second floor to have a look around upstairs. The building was virtually empty. Soon they discovered George’s office and took up residence. Some say they lit cigars and took turns sitting in George’s chair, Spaz with his Wellington motorcycle boots firmly planted on George’s big desk. Whatever happened, it quickly became part of Lucasfilm employee lore. It was stupid, but at the same time it pricked some of the company pomposity.

  Unfortunately for them, they had set off the infrared alarm system and Ranch security appeared. Lines like “Who are you?” and “No one is allowed up here” were heard. Spaz and Mark thought it might be funny to say that they were actually two managers at ILM, but they changed their story when told they were lying. Fabricating other names, they were allowed to leave.

  The funny thing is that these two were actually more important to the company than the leaders they
had claimed to be. The truth is, companies are bought and sold on the value of talent like this.

  When the president of Lucasfilm, Doug Norby, heard that Scott had invited Timothy Leary to a fancy dinner without authorization, he chewed him out, especially because both he and George thought Leary was a druggie, but when he later learned about the party in George’s office, he really blew his top.

  When George learned of this, he initially wanted the office offenders fired, which is understandable. “Why are people like this working for my company?” he reportedly asked. When it was explained to him that there were certain “key” employees that ILM could not do without, he relented. But they were famously “banned” from the Ranch. For some, this expression came to mean “distinguished,” and when a group of ILM employees later split off, forming their own visual effects company, they named it Banned From The Ranch.

  After this event, Scott Ross was scheming to overthrow Doug Norby and Norby was looking for an excuse to fire Scott. I had inherited a huge office that held my editing gear, my desk, and some really comfortable chairs that Marcia Lucas had commissioned. People used to drop by my office once in a while just to hide out from the pressure-cooker demands of their jobs. Mine was a quiet refuge, with old black-and-white panoramic photos of World War I soldiers and movie books galore. I had a whole set of “Where Are They Now?” books about forgotten people that were once famous, especially old Hollywood stars. There was also a very large movie library of not only our films, but also every interesting film on tape I could get my hands on.

  When Scott plopped down in one of my easy chairs one afternoon, I knew something was wrong. He only came by to borrow movies to entertain his kids at home. When he started reminiscing, I knew he had been given the cement shoes by Norby and was just waiting for the lawyers to finish with his settlement agreement and walking papers. This was one of those “keep your mouth shut and you will get a nice check to go away” deals.