Inside the Star Wars Empire

by Bill Kimberlin

  After the greetings were over, we shrunk the images of the participants to a small window at the bottom of the screen and filled the rest of the screen with the images to be discussed. This meant you still had visual contact with the other party, which is no small part of communication. The images were sometimes artwork for approval or more often film clips of shots we were working on. Each film clip was on a video player that could be controlled to run or stop on any frame in forward or reverse. In addition, each side had a pointer that could be used to bring attention to any part of the image. Since every frame was numbered, it was pretty easy for directors to say, “At frame 143, I’d like to see such and such start to happen.”

  This all may seem trivial, or matter-of-fact today, but if you look at the technology that people have flocked to in recent years, such as Facebook or TiVo or Netflix, I think it is largely the user experience that is being sold here. If you try to imagine Facebook without the controlled environment for sharing photographs being central to its platform, you get Myspace.

  From Poland, a portable satellite uplink was installed at whatever location Steven was shooting, so that at least once a day we could all watch whatever new work we had to show and get his direction. We were still working on the Jurassic Park dinosaurs at this point, so that was mostly what he was critiquing. But the trickiest assignment we had was the little girl in the red dress for Schindler.

  Schindler’s List was shot in black-and-white. Steven felt strongly that the subject matter determined that choice. Normally studios would vigorously oppose almost any film not shot in color for various worldwide marketing reasons. Peter Bogdanovich as late as his 2001 release of The Cat’s Meow had wanted, for artistic reasons, to shoot it in black-and-white, but the studio refused. This forced him to improvise. He shot it on color film stock but dressed the actors, designed the sets, and lit the movie in such a way that it looked much like a black-and-white movie.

  Steven had the power to override the studio and shoot his film in black-and-white. He had made tests using color film stock and, through film design and lab techniques, had tried a more complicated version of what Bogdanovich later did, but he was disappointed in the final result. It just didn’t have that glorious tonal range that the Hollywood master filmmakers had achieved through their cinematographers in the golden era of classic black-and-white films. In fact, a lot of the techniques used by directors like Josef von Sternberg are lost to history. Von Sternberg had brought his masterpiece The Blue Angel to one of my film classes in the late 1960s. As the lights were dimming he said, “This print is in German, but I will shout out anything you need to know.” He didn’t have to shout much because it was all told visually. What a gorgeous-looking movie. Cinematographers used to sneak onto his movie sets just to try to learn how he did it. By 1993 there were not many people left alive that knew much about either black-and-white photography or the lab processing techniques that the masters such as von Sternberg had used.

  Although committed to black-and-white, there were certain shots in Schindler’s List where Steven wanted to show the little girl as the only one in the frame that was in full color. The audience would see her red dress as the only color in the film. They would see a red dress in a black-and-white movie. But how to accomplish this on film? Digital projection of movies hadn’t been invented yet. We were working on shots digitally, but we were still releasing those shots on film stock.

  There were few options. Some early films, made before color stock was invented, had been hand-painted. Others were tinted with blue or red dyes to suggest night or fire. But none of these were modern choices except on some experimental films. The classic way to do this would be to shoot it on color film and then to optically create a duplicate negative on color stock but with all of the color drained out except where mattes were used to preserve the red dress. But how could this work? Even creating the shot using digital techniques still produced a color image. Movies were still being released on film, and these would be black-and-white prints. If color scenes were cut into the printing negative, they would, of course, not print in color on black-and-white stock. There was only one way, and I could not imagine this happening.

  At least 5,000 prints would be going out to theaters. Are they suggesting that someone is going to cut our red dress shots into every print released? That would be the only way it could be done. Yes, that was the plan. It was crazy, but that was the plan. I had a hard time believing the studio was actually going to allow this. Here was a movie going to be released in black-and-white and whatever its artistic merits, it was going to be a tough sell. The majority of the money for all films was by now coming from the release of the videotapes, and black-and-white videotapes didn’t sell or rent well. Is the studio going to allow this kind of expense in light of what might just be a personal statement film? Maybe they will actually just release a few special prints for major cities around the world and the rest will not contain our spliced-in shots.

  I had reason to be skeptical; directors had often seen their intended work modified for commercial reasons. Films were re-edited by powerful producers or studio heads. For instance, the original release prints of John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye had a beautiful golden hue that was expensively created by the Technicolor lab in Rome. I had seen it the day it opened at the Northpoint Theatre in San Francisco. When the film didn’t perform well enough, those prints were pulled and the general release prints were not so fancy. Surely Spielberg’s epic would meet the same fate.

  Schindler’s List was released in black-and-white with the red dress shots cut into each release print as described. It was seen as a prestige picture, and it was a critical and commercial success immediately upon release. Spielberg had pulled off a picture on the most delicate of subjects with style and grace while I had only proved that the old Hollywood adage of screenwriter William Goldman that “nobody knows anything” was still quite true. Before a film is released, no one knows what is going to happen.

  The Intern

  Lucasfilm had a program to encourage the hiring of interns throughout all of its divisions, which now included filmmaking, visual effects, computer graphics, games, commercials, sound design, sound systems, movie theater acoustics, and business affairs. I used to borrow one of the early Hewlett-Packard portable computers over the weekends from business affairs when I was working on a screenplay.

  Business affairs was where they counted the money and made all the lucrative licensing deals. In their offices was a list on the wall of all the countries in the world where Star Wars was distributed. The list was then broken down into areas like states, and then by cities. The number of cities on that list, that produced the ticket and merchandising sales that supported us all, was mind-boggling. Just imagine for a minute how many cities there are in the world. Then multiply that by the number of movie theaters in those cities, and you get some idea of how extensive movie profits can be.

  There was a floppy disk left in the computer I borrowed that listed the oil wells the company had invested in—guess you have to do something with all that money flowing in. Of course, business affairs had an intern; we all did.

  The interns would arrive in batches twice a year. For the fall program they would get college credit. For the summer one they were paid a stipend and the company helped find them temporary housing. I am not sure what hoops they had to jump through to get accepted, but by the time they got to my department, they were the brightest and whitest group of college kids anyone will ever see. Most were from the top universities in the country and all were razor sharp, but the thing that was so refreshing about them was their unbridled enthusiasm. They weren’t jaded like we were, so they lifted everyone’s spirits. Unfortunately, some departments took advantage of the free labor, but that was eventually corrected, or at least I think it was.

  My department was largely union jobs, which our interns were not supposed to do, but I was still able to teach them valuable less
ons in moviedom. I kept asking why there were no black student interns, but those in charge kept saying that none applied or something. I kept insisting that they needed to go out and find them, not wait for a knock on the door. We finally got a few black employees, but not many interns.

  One kid we got came before the program had even started, and his name was John Knoll. John had been recommended by someone at USC, George’s alma mater. He was a bright kid, but it took a while to find out just how bright.

  While we were working on The Golden Child (1986), one of the gags involved the young Buddha-like child displaying his mystical powers by bringing a dead butterfly back to life. My boss, Ken Ralston, was working on this problem. He had accumulated a lot of dead butterflies but hadn’t quite figured out how to resuscitate one on camera, when John came to me and showed me a mechanical butterfly that he had built. “Perhaps Ken could use this,” he said. “Would you show it to him for me?” It was a great mechanical feat, as its wings flapped and everything, so I showed it to Ken, even though I knew he couldn’t use it. Ken eventually drugged a butterfly and shot it so that when we printed it in reverse, it appears to wake up and fly away.

  When John’s internship was over, I used to see him in the front office waiting to talk to the general manager, who was trying to think of a way to keep him around. Finally they hired him as an assistant in the matte department, I think it was. Like many of the staff, he kept getting laid off as projects ended and rehired as new ones started. Gradually people began to realize that this was no ordinary, run-of-the-mill smart kid. In fact, John is the only person I ever heard George Lucas label a genius. But that was much later; for now John was spending his evenings at home working on a software project.

  At least part of this project included stuff he had observed around the studio, things that were lacking or would be neat to have. Sometimes John would get stuck and have to call his older brother, Tom, back in Michigan, for help. Later, when John would have just done some amazing feat that we were all in awe of, we used to laugh and say, “You know, John has an older smarter brother back East.”

  It turned out that what John was working on, with his brother’s help was . . . Photoshop. John invented perhaps the most successful software program (after Windows) ever written. Even today, if you open up the Photoshop program, the first visible page of credits starts with the name Thomas Knoll, John having sold his interests.

  John, at least when I knew him, also had that special quality of being almost as surprised as you were about his gifts. He would say stuff like, “I really don’t know how to do real programming, but look at this, it’s something I was fooling around with last night.” What else was there to say but “Wow.” John is now the creative director of ILM and one of its principle project supervisors.

  I finally found a black kid to bring to Lucasfilm, but I had to do it myself and he wasn’t an intern, just an eleven-year-old boy who I was mentoring. Michael was from West Oakland. He had never been to a restaurant where you didn’t have to pay before you ate. My goal was to allow him to see that there was another world out there beyond what he knew. His father had been in San Quentin State Prison and the whole deal was a little tricky to pull off, but I managed to do it, learning at least as much as he did in the process.

  He and his buddies could beat their teachers at chess but were having trouble with reading and writing. Nothing was as I had expected it to be. His so-called ghetto neighborhood was where he felt safe, surrounded by his extended family in an all-black neighborhood interspersed with parks. A lady friend of mine thought I was brave to even go to Oakland, saying “I could never go, I have young children.” She was saying that if she went to Oakland she would be leaving motherless children after she was inevitably shot down in the streets.

  These were the kind of wildly exaggerated opinions each community had of the other. I took Michael to Mill Valley, a place where I used to joke the criminals not only have never been, but don’t even know exists. Everywhere I took him it was totally white, and he looked around warily. I couldn’t really tell what he was making of all this, but he did say things that gave me clues. After finishing one meal he said, “We could just leave.” Another time he asked me what I thought about stealing a car. All I could think to say was, “Why steal one if you can just buy one?” He was feeling me out with things he probably couldn’t ask other adults.

  I thought I was going to be a mentor, and it turned out Michael needed tutoring. His family had told him he was stupid. My wife is a math whiz and she said, “Give me one month with that kid, and I can change the course of his life. If you know math, nobody can call you stupid.” So we launched into tutoring.

  I brought him to a Lucasfilm “take your kid to work” day. I really didn’t know what would happen when he was surrounded by all these privileged white kids, but perhaps because the environment was so new to all the kids and so much entertainment had been arranged, it was a wash. Everyone just had a great time.

  Acting Out

  One of the things that movie fans are sometimes surprised to hear is that people working on what I will call genre films, like science fiction for instance, may have no interest in that genre. Nilo Rodis was one of the main designers on both Star Wars and Star Trek and he has told the tale of flunking his original job interview with George Lucas by saying he didn’t read, watch, or like science fiction. George hired him anyway because of his talent.

  We were all a little leery of hiring someone who was a huge fan of the movies we were making. People were hired for their talent and professionalism. This is not to say that many of us were not die-hard movie fans of all stripes, just that everyone kept their mouth shut until you got to know them. The only thing I can liken it to is going to job interviews at Xerox and Polaroid back in the early 1970s. They seemed like progressive companies to me, but on my first interview I was disabused of that fact when the recruiter said, “That’s just our commercials, kid. This is just another corporation.”

  However, if you could just get past the well-advertised but largely absent glamour of working in the movie business, it could be a hell of a lot of fun. Sometimes one of us would even get into the act. When I worked on Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, I had my only chance at screen immortality when my boss Ken asked me to stand in for a guard on the bridge of a spaceship. Don’t ask which one—I never could stand Star Trek—but I thought I might be able to sabotage the ship and bring the whole series down with it, so I agreed. They fitted me with a uniform, and I went through the entire process of being a stand-in. I spent several hours on the set while they got the lighting right for the next day’s shoot. No luck in bringing down the series—it’s hard to sabotage cardboard.

  For the day of the real shoot, they had hired a local actor for my stand-in part. Then someone called me and said, “Ken says, just get Bill to do it—the suit fit him great.” Well, I wish I’d seen that one coming, but I didn’t. Now, I wanted to do it, but I was in a rush with my editing work and just couldn’t stop. Good thing I don’t believe in karma, or whatever it’s called, or I might believe my thoughts of sabotage had lost me the chance to appear in a major film. My friend Mike Gleason did get to play Hitler, though. Sort of.

  On Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), there was a scene where Indy is undercover at some affair in Germany during Hitler’s reign, and he has to ask the Führer for his autograph to escape detection or something. So Spielberg’s production staff sent Indy’s prop notebook up to us at ILM because Stephen felt he needed a close-up of the signing and they hadn’t shot one originally. The notebook was made by the studio prop department and had all kinds of details, as if it were . . . well, a real notebook. The shot was so close, all you could see was the book, Hitler’s hand signing, and a little bit of his coat sleeve. They used my friend Mike as the Hitler stand-in and they shot forty-five takes of him signing “Adolph.” We sent the film down to Spielberg the next day and he pronounced it per
fect.

  A few days later, we got another call from the Indy producer: “That’s not how you spell ‘Adolf,’ and he was left-handed, not right-handed.” Oops. So Mike did the whole thing over again, but they let him do it right-handed, and he got to keep the prop book, which made a great conversation piece.

  Mike kept the book in his editing room for the next twenty years, but when it came time for him to retire, he felt he had to tell the company that he still had a copy of the prop book that production had originally told him he could keep. By this time the other copy of the prop book was in a glass display case in the main house at the Ranch, along with Indy’s famous hat and whip. The prop was more than just a book—it also held a treasure trove of things that the writers and producers thought it should contain, details like a mock letter from Indy’s father (played by Sean Connery), German money, etc. Lots of cool details. Being uncomfortable taking this home to retirement, Mike decided to ask one more time if he could really keep it. So he called an executive he knew at the company. The executive said no, he should give it back. It most likely resides in that executive’s den now. Value to a movie memorabilia collector? Huge.

  Moviemakers try to be somewhat accurate but they are making a drama, not a documentary, so story concerns often outweigh historical accuracy to the dismay of history buffs everywhere, me included. For several years after I left ILM I had an office at the Fantasy building in Berkeley. This was headquarters to Saul Zaentz’s movie company as well as to his music recording company. Saul and his partners had made a fortune in the record business and then started producing hit movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Several friends and acquaintances also had offices or editing rooms there.