Inside the Star Wars Empire

by Bill Kimberlin

  When I got the slot machine home, I wondered whether I should just not tell the wife and take it to Boonville on my next trip or get it over with right now. I opened the lift back and dropped the tailgate to my SUV, invited her out, and handed her a quarter. She pulled the handle, hit three cherries, scooped up the jackpot, and disappeared back into the house saying, “That was fun.” I never had a problem after that, and we both occasionally pull the handle when we are in the country. Steve had warned me to “play it often—they like that.” There is something about pulling that handle and going through this little exercise of anticipation, suspense, and surprise, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I wish I could ask Montaigne what he thought.

  My machine had come out of Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino, which had been started by a former butcher named Harvey Gross. He and his wife ran a popular lunch counter with a few slots back in the 1940s. With that start, they grew it into a large casino enterprise that cleared them about a million dollars a year by the 1950s. Investor types kept pleading with him to expand throughout Nevada. He always gave the same answer: “With a million bucks a year, we are doing fine. After all, how many steaks can you eat?”

  Here was another story that I could use somewhere, maybe after my distribution business runs out of gas. But it doesn’t ever seem to, even though at $25, our movie is not cheap. Last Christmas alone, I mailed over 500 DVDs of American Nitro from Boonville in about three days, overwhelming the local post office. I don’t have to wait for a royalty statement and a check from a publisher to know how I’m doing. Besides, it’s more of a hobby anyway—that and my effort to keep the work alive for as long as I can. Next up to restore and distribute will be my old Jack Johnson movie.

  This distribution thing all came about through a somewhat strange set of circumstances. It isn’t supposed to happen. Creative people do their work and depend on a company that specializes in distribution to handle that for a fee, a large fee. And for that fee, the publisher is supposed to do advertising and promotion for their authors. This rarely works out well for the writers and filmmakers. Unfortunately there is no alternative to this for most people, but there have always been exceptions.

  Mark Twain did not do what his contemporaneous authors did. Twain published his own books and sold them door to door, hiring agents for this arduous task. His methods were far outside the conventional book publishing trade. This just wasn’t done by serious authors. It smacked of vanity publishing or cheap low-class books, except that this was also the way that the Bible was sold: door to door. Twain was very successful at this because he could laugh at any vanity publishing charge. He was Mark Twain.

  His biggest success using this method was in publishing the memoirs of General Ulysses S. Grant, which I have mentioned before. It was one of the largest publishing successes in American history. Twain sold more of these books than anything except the Bible, and it brought Grant’s family over $500,000 in royalties, a fortune in the 1880s. I reread the memoirs myself every few years.

  In 2002 I decided to follow the Mark Twain route and distribute my own movie. Like George Lucas, I felt that now no one could tell that I was too old or uncool to make movies. I was retired and was done working on other people’s projects. Besides the country house, I had a home in Berkeley, some real estate investment property, and a steady income from several sources. As Montaigne had recommended, I had prepared to be my own host.

  At some point I discovered that the movie my brother and I had made, American Nitro, was being talked about in certain Internet chat groups. Long out of distribution, it had become a kind of cult film. This and the circus-like atmosphere of the whole thing made the movie a viable commercial entity and a historical document. One of the people in the film section of the Library of Congress told us that “your movie is pure Americana and will only get more and more interesting as time passes.” That was enough for me.

  We pulled the original 35mm negative out of storage and had it transferred to a digital format of the highest quality available. That’s the great thing about motion picture negatives—they are of such high quality that you can keep going back to them again and again as current technologies improve. In fact, a couple of years ago I sold some of our footage to a Hollywood studio that was making a feature film on two of the characters in our movie for $100 a second.

  I toyed with the idea of changing the movie, at least to the extent of trying to set it up for the non–racing fan. There was a Roman quote about bread and circuses that I tried out, but nothing seemed to improve it, so I decided to leave it as it was originally. The only thing we added was a directors’ commentary where my brother and I gave our thoughts on where the movie came from and what we had tried to do.

  It was a drive-in picture and almost everyone saw it as just a drag race documentary. Which it was. But if you thought about it for a minute, who in the hell would make a drag race documentary like this? It didn’t hype its subject, it exposed it as a strange and somewhat hidden subculture—an outlaw sport which neither drag race officialdom nor the reviewers much appreciated. There were a few people who got it, however. On the high end, it was seen as “asphalt anthropology,” and on the low, “I watched it every night for a year, just ask my wife.” That’s a real fan quote, and as a friend of mine pointed out, that should read “ex-wife.”

  Looking back, it seems that the art movement of the 1970s went through a kind of metamorphosis from abstraction to realism, or at least some of it did, and this was felt in filmmaking and still photography as well. I think of our movie as Contemporary Realism. Other examples are the movie Derby, a documentary on the fringe sport of roller derby, and the book Suburbia by Bill Owens, whose black-and-white still photos chronicled the early 1970s suburban lifestyles of Americans. I’m sure I would be hard-pressed to find any art critic to agree with me, but I really don’t care—they will get to it eventually. For now, Nitro has well over 800,000 fans on Facebook. I looked up the ranking of our page once and at that time we were ahead of Johnny Depp, the Los Angeles Lakers, Bonnie Raitt, Starbucks, the iPhone 6, and Patsy Cline.

  It is hard to find a male (and a surprising number of females) between the ages of thirty and seventy that does not have fond memories of hot rod cars in high school, or their father taking them to the races, or going racing themselves with their buddies. It was endemic to the culture, and we had attempted to chronicle this wide segment of the population. These are the guys we send to fight our wars. They drive the long-haul trucks, snowplows, and heavy equipment. They go hunting and fishing. They like guns and motorcycles and hot rod custom cars of one kind or another. They are religious and they are patriotic. They are the first to feel some of the harshest blows due to high gasoline prices, moving jobs overseas, technological change, or economic downturns.

  So in an effort to find that audience and engage with them, I created a social media page on Facebook for fans of American Nitro, but not just the movie. I wanted it to represent the zeitgeist of this particular part of our culture as well. Since I am not a participant in this world, I can only be an observer and commentator. This makes the site an extension of the movie in a way. Yet, I have never heard of anyone else doing something like this before. Sometimes it seems more like a kind of performance piece. However, if the artist Cindy Sherman can dress up as stereotypical characters from everyday life and then photograph herself as her art, I guess I can communicate with my group through role-playing.

  When I started I was only able to attract a handful of people, but as I learned how to appeal to them, it soon started to grow. We currently have a very large number of fans on the site. Many of them have purchased the movie from us, and many more will in time. People hear about the movie from the Facebook page, watch the trailers either there or on YouTube, and order it through our website using PayPal. This means we don’t have to do any billing, as PayPal collects the money and deposits it in our bank before we ship the DVDs.

  For th
e computer phobic we accept checks, and there must be some kind of economic law here or something, because we’ve never had a returned check in eight years. Apparently people don’t bounce checks for their hobbies. They may short the grocer or the landlord, but not the discretionary items that they really don’t need. Or do they? Perhaps we are just more passionate about our hobbies. Many have commented that our website is “eye candy” or even “car porn” for them. So far I have been flying completely under the radar of the studio system, hoping to remain undetected.

  One thing is for sure, I’ve gotten to know how the fans think, as this is a window into their lives. I see pictures of their children and their homes, as well as their parents and grandparents. I know where they live and what they do, and can predict how they will react to most things. Their voting for Trump was one of those things. Politics aside, it is a fascinating group that is easy to like. As best as I can describe it, we are continuing the dialogue with the audience for the movie through a totally different medium.

  This method of doing things was not even available just a few years ago, but it will expand for filmmakers, writers, musicians, and other artists with every passing year—that is if they are not reluctant to use technology. Many older artists and writers are especially timid when it comes to the vast array of digital resources now available to them, and I try to encourage anyone I run across to learn how it can be useful to them in their work. There is actually a Silicon Valley term that I’ve modified to describe people who shy away from these latest technologies. It’s called “tech debt,” and it translates into one’s getting behind in those tech areas that can be of immense help to them as time goes on.

  So what are my lessons? You have to make a living, but you need to also do your own work. You always need a side project: a book, a film, a screenplay, photography, painting, poetry, music, whatever it is. You must not let your job make your personal work totally subservient. You will find that what you learn from your side project eventually will either make you more successful at your career or it will become your career.

  That’s the story of one guy from that long list of credits at the end of the movie. It is what happened to a person who was trying to lead a creative life and still make a living. I sometimes wonder if the movie moguls I worked with ever have as much fun as I do. After all, “how many steaks can you eat?”

  About the Author

  Bill Kimberlin has worked on dozens of films (imdb.com/name/nm0453863/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1) and is sought after as a lecturer and speaker on the subject of special effects. He is the director of the film American Nitro (the film that nabbed him a coveted spot in Lucas’s studio), which has a strong cult following, including close to 800,000 followers on Facebook. Inside the Star Wars Empire is his first book.