Inside the Star Wars Empire

by Bill Kimberlin

  None of the Lucasfilm executives wanted George fooling around with his old movies. “It’s a distraction,” they said. “We are not in the restoration business.” The new movies were where the big money was. Lucasfilm’s licensing was going nuts signing up sponsors and endless tie-ins. If George would commit to make three more Star Wars sequels, there was no limit to the money that could be made. Sales, marketing, legal—they all conspired to put on a huge show at the Ranch, to which they invited all the suitor toy, game, studio, and brand folks from around the world.

  Hundreds of millions of dollars in advance money was at stake, not to mention the billions of dollars that would almost certainly flow from these deals if only the “old man,” the crazy grandfather they had metaphorically locked in the attic of the main house, wasn’t stirring up shit—wandering around in his bathrobe, so to speak, laying out plans and giving orders that were not in line with the juggernaut business plan of the century that business affairs was about to launch. This was a potential disaster. He owned the company outright. It was a billion-dollar enterprise but it was not a public company like Apple, where the executives could execute a coup and overnight throw out a Steve Jobs. They had to be careful. And here, I show up with even wilder ideas about doing a historical documentary. “Who is this guy?” indeed. I was seen immediately as a coconspirator and should, like Howard Beale in the movie Network, have been given the same famous film speech he got:

  You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale . . . There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multi-variant, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichsmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

  It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!

  All was not well in the Empire by about 1996 or so. The ancillary money stream from toy deals that George had so famously bargained for with the original Star Wars had dwindled. The bonanza of home video sales had also dissipated. The lifetime “annuity” of cash that arrived to help smooth the balance sheets was now but a trickle. ILM was the bright spot. It was profitable most years, but the rest of the divisions were, for the most part, losing money. There had been the disappointment in the failure of Howard the Duck, along with a string of productions that made some money but not really enough to keep the whole studio afloat for years. Willow, Labyrinth, The Return of Oz, Mishima, The Young Indiana Jones television series—all did not have the blockbuster strength needed to make sense as a business plan that could underwrite the entire company like Star Wars had.

  The original idea was sound: Make your money on the big picture releases every few years, and try to just break even during the intervening years. But when blockbusters are removed from that scenario, you are in trouble.

  So, what to do? If you are a rock ’n’ roll band, you go back on the road. If you are the ex–heavyweight champion, you return to the ring for one more big payday. There was really no other choice. I had walked into the middle of this scenario without knowing what was going on behind the scenes, and I would have to atone.

  This reminded me of the time after I had first had my encounter with Francis Coppola, and I thought it would be a good idea to either write an article about him or just interview him. Maybe I could sell the interview to a magazine. So I wrote to his company, American Zoetrope, and made a proposal for an interview for Playboy magazine. They liked the idea but needed a letter from Playboy confirming it. So I wrote to Playboy laying out my argument for such an interview by saying that Coppola was a young, hip Oscar-winning filmmaker who had founded his own company in San Francisco. They also liked the idea but thought it was a little too early. “Let’s keep our eye on him and see what develops,” they wrote me.

  About a year after The Godfather was released and became the highest-grossing motion picture of all time, I wrote Playboy again and reminded them of my Coppola interview project. This time they wrote back in a much firmer tone. “When people go to see a film because it is a Francis Coppola film, then we would consider him for a Playboy interview.” I didn’t know what to make of that. However, it seemed clear they were not going to consider my interview choice, so I moved on. In July 1975 I was at a newsstand and the cover of Playboy had this headline: “Big Hit Man Talks! Playboy Grills ‘Godfather’ Director Francis Ford Coppola.” I didn’t see my name there anywhere.

  The Star Wars original negative was in the studio vault in Los Angeles, but there were elements important to a restoration that came from the mine shaft. With something this important, more than one location is a prudent way to insure a backup master would survive. The original plan was to only redo the wipes, those famously old-fashioned Star Wars transitions that literally wiped one image off the screen while bringing on the next one in an optical trick used in the old movie serials. George never liked how they looked, and he wanted them redone.

  While unofficially no one wanted this restoration to happen, they couldn’t really come right out and say that, but, like Congress, they could subtly defy the president’s wishes by not funding it. There was a standoff for a while. George kept ordering stuff and adding to the shots he wanted fixed. For our part, ILM opened a project billing account and started charging all our time to it. Not much the executives at the Ranch could do about that. Ironically, the Ranch was a little different: That was the executives’ domain, and it was under their control. So they formed a committee to oversee the restoration project, told Tom Christopher to attend, and started giving orders to mute the whole thing. But they had a problem: George asked to meet with Tom every Friday and give him a report on how things were going on the restoration. Very few people met with George on a regular basis. The power had now shifted.

  Tom is a very smart, detail-oriented guy. He doesn’t play politics or suffer fools gladly. He didn’t argue or plead his case, he didn’t threaten or pull a “George said,” he just went back to the committee and simply said, “I need you to issue three purchase orders, and I will bill everything I need to them.” Game over. The purchase orders were issued and the original Star Wars was going to get some updates and a restoration.

  Tom set up a command center editing room at the Ranch and hired assistants. He found the original negative at Fox and the separation masters in a salt mine somewhere in the Midwest, but he couldn’t find the original negatives for the wipes. They looked all over Los Angeles—no luck. Nobody asked me. They were in my ILM editorial warehouse. This illustrates one of the strange things about working for a large company. Information is valuable, it is power, and no one wants to give it up. Lucasfilm was a collection of fiefdoms, and all information was held strictly inside those fiefdoms. No one would tell you anything they didn’t absolutely have to.

  Tom knew this and decided to do the exact opposite. He told his assistants that if anyone called with any questions, they were to answer them as best they could and he did the same himself. Slowly, over time, this meant that Tom became the “go-to” guy for the entire company. Since everyone was in the dark, even the top executives, this meant that they could have their secretaries call Tom’s editing room and ask, for instance, where George was. There was no downside in calling Tom because he was just an editor. Calling George’s assistant and major gatekeeper Jane Bay would be noted. The question of why they wanted to know might be asked. No, it was best to just call Tom.

  Finally someone called me about the missing wipe originals and I said, “Let’s have a look in our warehouse.” I too had the “answer all questions” policy. I’d learned that from Karen, the receptionist. Tom was a freelancer, not on staff, so it took him a while to find me. We had the negative and everything else he was looking for.

  Everything should have bee
n easy in restoring Star Wars because the studio had made Technicolor dye separation masters. This was the classic method of making color movies from black-and-white negatives by dyeing prints from each of the three negatives with either red, green, or blue. Gone with the Wind was shot in Technicolor by an enormous camera that exposed three black-and-white negatives in-camera, at once, with these primary colors. Star Wars had been shot with the later standard color negative made by Eastman Kodak, but to preserve the film, the Technicolor three-strip method was used because, while Eastman negatives would deteriorate with shrinkage and fading colors, the Technicolor method would not. You just made new color prints off the bulletproof black-and-white masters.

  This Technicolor process had a backstory that I discovered one day while wandering around San Rafael on my lunch hour. It’s a little side note to this story of the restoration and the Technicolor elements that were used to preserve Star Wars, but it is typical of how things evolve in Hollywood. It turns out that in 1918 the first feature-length color motion picture was shot in San Rafael, the same city where I worked at ILM, by a man named Leon Douglas. I first learned about him while visiting a downtown area of old Marin mansions where he lived.

  Mr. Douglas was a very wealthy man who had cofounded the Victor Talking Machine Company, famous for its ads that featured a dog looking into the horn of a Victrola with the line, “His Master’s Voice.” The Victrola was a windup record player and Douglas’s version of a phonograph. He named his invention after his wife, Victoria. After Douglas encased the player in a fine furniture cabinet, so ladies would allow it in their living rooms, it became universally popular and he sold millions of them. He sold so many of them that he had to hire 7,000 cabinetmakers just to keep up with the demand.

  Douglas was also a prolific inventor who held over fifty patents. For motion pictures he patented a zoom lens, the first anamorphic lens, a special effects camera which he rented to Hollywood studios, and his color film process. It was here in Marin where he produced the first American feature-length color film, starring Ruth Roland with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks making guest appearances.

  When Douglas took his color process to all the major studios to demonstrate it, no one was interested. Yet, by the 1930s color motion pictures were being made using the Technicolor process, which was based on Douglas’s inventions, and all the studios were distributing them. Douglas sued to enforce his patents and won a $20 million settlement in 1934. He won by default when the defendants—Paramount Pictures, Fox Film Corporation, Disney, and Technicolor—failed to respond to the suit. Needless to say, $20 million was a lot of money in 1934, arguably the bottom of the Great Depression. Still, Hollywood would often rather just buy technology than invest in its development.

  In the late 1970s when the protection masters of Star Wars, the highest-grossing movie of all time, were made by what was now 20th Century Fox and the Douglas-inspired Technicolor, they did it on the cheap. There are two ways to make these masters: wet or dry. Either way is expensive, but the wet printing method is more expensive. Essentially the negative image from the original is rephotographed through a special liquid that makes any scratches, and some dirt, not register on the copy negative. The liquid fills up the scratch, thus letting the projector light pass straight through the film and not catch in the groove of the scratch, revealing a blemish.

  Someone chose the cheaper alternative, and we were paying for that now. Eventually Tom got all of the technical challenges met by looking up some of the older lab employees from the golden era of motion picture labs. Upon their advice he had the various negatives rewashed or reprinted using the wet-gate method, all the while finding various pieces that had gone missing from this giant puzzle.

  Soon all was ready to cut into the original Star Wars negative. Before doing that, however, Tom wanted to check something with George. He explained to George that everything was ready to cut in, but he wanted to know whether they should order a duplicate negative of the original version. It could easily be done, he said, and then there would always be an original version of this historic movie. George said, “This is the original version,” meaning that what everyone else had described as a restoration, he considered the final version of the movie.

  This brings up an interesting point. Who should decide these things? Should the public have any say in what happens to a work of art or a national treasure? After paying almost $200 million for a famous van Gogh, should the owner object if van Gogh himself showed up and said, “I always wanted to add more blue to this, but I couldn’t afford it back then. Mind if I add it now?” Are there cultural treasures that are so important that they shouldn’t be changed, even by the artists that created them? Franz Kafka wanted all of his writings burned after his death. Fortunately for posterity, they were not. Is the quality or historical value of a work of art more meaningful than the wishes of its author? Should Harper Lee have been allowed to publish Go Set a Watchman, turning her heroic main character in To Kill a Mockingbird, beloved by millions, into a racist?

  As we advance into the digital world of the future, where undetectable changes can be made with increasing sophistication, this question will, I think, be asked again and again.

  The original Star Wars was rereleased in 1997 as the “Special Edition” and it skyrocketed to the number one position at the box office for three weeks, grossing over $138 million. This surprised a lot of people, even George I suspect. Empire and Jedi soon followed, all of them together grossing more than $250 million. These unwanted rereleases helped build a cash pile that could fund the new Star Wars films that would ultimately generate billions of dollars in new revenue. George was back in the game.

  Digital City

  For some time it had become apparent that ILM had outgrown its location in Marin County, and once again the impracticality of the Ranch came up. There was certainly enough room to expand the Ranch to include ILM, but there were other problems. George had already developed an adjoining property he owned called Big Rock Ranch, but it made his neighbors unhappy, and although he later got permission from the county to build a production facility on even another ranch he owned, he wisely decided to not force it.

  So, around 1999, when it came time to make a big proposal to move ILM to the Presidio in San Francisco, we made a pitch to both the board that controls the Presidio and its well-heeled neighbors. The old Presidio army base is surrounded by some of the most expensive residential real estate in the country. These neighbors had connections to politics and business, so they needed to be reassured. This move also was tantamount to admitting that the Ranch was not where all the new young talent wanted to be. The digital artists that needed to be continuously recruited had no interest in living in Lucasland or anywhere else but San Francisco. Even Silicon Valley would later have to make serious concessions, offering high-class busses to and from the city in order to be competitive in attracting talent.

  George wanted to make a short film explaining why everyone should approve his building a series of structures on the old Letterman Army Hospital site on the Presidio grounds and moving a large part of his company there. They even recruited me to work on this film project. In our first meeting, the director and cinematographer, Bob Dalva, explained that he wanted to open the film with a montage of antique projection devices culminating in a modern one.

  The proposed buildings were sited in such a way that they looked right down at the Palace of Fine Arts, a building designed by the famous local architect Bernard Maybeck. This beloved building was the only remnant of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, which celebrated not only the opening of the West via the new Panama Canal, but also the introduction of electric lighting and the first trans-Atlantic telephone call, which was the last link to connecting the world. So I suggested that we use some of the spectacular public-domain footage of this fair as well. It showed an entire city of exposition buildings, all lit with thousands of early electric lights. It was a magical-looki
ng city covered with reflective globes that doubled the power of the lights, and searchlights that continuously swept the skies. This area of the Marina District had been largely reclaimed bay marsh, and it was built on fill. Importantly, the fill used was the rubble from the old San Francisco that had collapsed in 1906. By implication, we would be pointing to a rebirth of the city, whose digital future would repeat this famous analog opening of a canal. In other words, approve our proposal and help make San Francisco the center of the digital world, a world that Marshall McLuhan had presaged as a “global village.”

  Director Dalva shouted this idea down so forcefully that I just dropped it. It was as if I had suggested something that was uncinematic. Bob had a long history with both Lucas and Coppola and was a noted cinematographer/editor, so there was no point in arguing.

  My next idea was accepted but with incredulity. I said, if you want to film some old movie projectors, I have a friend that has an amazing collection of them and she works right here at ILM. Sandra Joy Lee was our media librarian. She was whip-smart, very congenial, and, as a hobby, she collected old movie projectors from the earliest Zoetropes to beautiful, almost Deco-looking mid-1930s projectors. She also donated her time working as a projectionist at the local art house movie theater that Marcia Lucas had donated money to restore. This was the same theater to which I had ridden my bike from my Aunt Bobbitt’s apartment as a child.

  Sandra was yet another example of the amazing talent ILM had brought together. What other young woman is there that just so happens to collect and operate antique motion picture equipment?

  Sandra’s library department had absorbed my old video movie collection from the editorial department, and she had lined the archive walls with displays of her great old projectors. This was an idea that could not be just dismissed out of hand, so when I dropped by Sandra’s library a few days later, Dalva had the whole place lit like a movie set and Sandra was beaming that her collection was being used to help us get awarded the coveted acreage on an invaluable site in the Presidio.