Along with the amazing roster of talented people that worked at Lucasfilm when I started in 1982 was an even larger group of people who might otherwise have been canning peas or working as secretaries. They had no film background or motion picture experience of any kind. Yet, through happenstance or pure luck, they had been swept into this relatively new and hugely successful company in every conceivable position from receptionist to horse wrangler at the Ranch. After a few months many of these employees would conclude that they were now in the motion picture business and that there should be no limit to their ambitions. Indeed, over the years there appeared to be no limit. One of the original receptionists became the head of all production. A woman that started off on the maintenance crew, empting the trash baskets, became a top digital engineer that now works at Pixar, the hugely successful animation company.
In part, the company was a meritocracy where anyone who was smart and ambitious had an opportunity to advance. As with most companies, the tone was set from the top, and that was George Lucas. He had come from nowhere, and the message to the employees was that you could come from nowhere too and still succeed. There was no better example of this than Chris, a young fellow I came to know while helping him get a small film made for a college project.
Years earlier, George had been looking for someone to watch over his enormous Skywalker Ranch property as it was being developed, and Chris related to me how he came to be that person. He met for his interview with George and Marcia Lucas at their home in San Anselmo, California. They had purchased the oldest house in Marin County after the success of American Graffiti and had returned it to the elegant mansion it once had been. Sometime late in the interview, Chris, who was only twenty-three or so, asked whether, if he were hired, his friends could visit. “Of course,” George said. “This will be your home.”
Just at that moment there was a light knock on the door and George’s executive secretary and gatekeeper, Jane Bay, stuck her head in and said, “I’m sorry to bother you, George, but I have Sir Laurence Olivier on the phone, and he wishes to speak with you.” What happened next still puzzled Chris a little bit as he related, “George said to her, ‘I’m talking to Chris right now. Tell him I’ll call back.’” That doesn’t happen in Hollywood.
The flip side of this field of opportunities was the minefield of ambitions it set off in some, and I would have plenty of firefights with these individuals in the days and years to come.
Early on, the big question in my mind was whether I could compete in the deep end of the pool where the highly skilled people swam. I was about to find out.
Every year there was an event called the Droid Olympics, pitting the editorial staff of all the local film companies against each other. On a given weekend we would gather at Walter Murch’s house in Inverness. Walter is a legend in the film business for his talents as an editor, sound designer, and author. He represents those amazingly talented people that make directors’ movies so much better than they otherwise would have been. His editing and sound design work on Apocalypse Now and The Godfather, to name just two, is a large part of what makes such an indelible impression on everyone who sees the films. What really sets him apart, however, is his ability to write and lecture on filmmaking. He is the only film professional I have ever met who not only excels at the craft, but can also give an explanation of the intellectual framework of making movies that is profound and effective.
The Friday before the event, George came by the effects editorial department at ILM to deliver the T-shirts he designed for us to wear as part of his team. Whenever I got the chance, I always tried to say something provocative to him just to see if I could get him to talk or tell moviemaking “war stories” like we all did when we got together outside of work. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. This time I said something stupid like, “With these shirts, how can we lose?” He turned to me with a weird look and said, “At my rate, those are the most expensive T-shirts you will ever own.”
In the movie business everyone has a rate—that is, if they are not studio staff people. They work by contract for a given period of time at their given rate. A feature film editor in those days might have made $10,000 a week, which sounds like a lot of money except for the fact that months can go by without any work. This feast-or-famine style of income makes it hard for many people to handle their finances. In a sense, if you work in production, you are fired every Friday. That’s payday. You get paid every week and if they are going to let you go, that’s when it happens. Your goal is to keep getting jobs one after another. This often means no vacations because you are afraid if you turn work down, the next time they won’t call you. You are like an actor, waiting for the phone to ring. This became my life.
I don’t know what George’s rate was or how he calculated it back then, but for a guy worth about $100 million, it had to be substantial. Still, except for his building sprees, he wasn’t ostentatious. After the Empire Strikes Back came out and was a big success another employee told me, “We all noticed that George got new tires for his Camaro.”
Oh, and I still have the T-shirt.
The Droid events were inspired by cutting room tasks that we were all way too familiar with. For instance, who could run the fastest time across the yard and back carrying and not dropping an impossibly high load of empty cardboard trim boxes (used to hold film trims or clips) in their arms. Or who could spin the highest number on the footage counter that is attached to a film synchronizer (which holds picture and soundtrack in sync when winding film). Silly stuff like that.
When my turn came, I did all of the tasks fairly well except one: running an upright Moviola editing machine, blindfolded, and stopping it when you thought one minute on the time counter had passed. I did it perfectly. I hit the brake on exactly one minute, which shot my score up. All our names were up on a big blackboard and the scores were updated immediately. When I hit the highest score on the board, George, who at that time barely knew who I was, walked over and said, “Nice job.” This from a man who never talked to anyone he didn’t know very well.
This was a lesson. This guy was so competitive that he could rise out of his reticence if he spotted a winner. My score subsequently sank and I turned back into a pumpkin, but it was fun while it lasted. Now he knew who I was.
Originally, Return of the Jedi was called Revenge of the Jedi. George had decided to change the name of the movie reportedly because some little kid wrote and reminded him that Jedis don’t seek revenge. Whether they do or not, I have no idea. We all admired and respected George Lucas as a brilliant filmmaker, but after months of work in the trenches trying to pull this movie off, the fantasy stuff had rubbed us a little raw. When the executives and lawyers at the Ranch asked the employees to come up with a name for the company’s central computer system, my department suggested Rochester, after the famed black character portrayed by Eddie Anderson on the old Jack Benny television program. Rochester was supposed to be a valet to Benny but he always got the better of his boss. We hoped for the same results. Instead they chose Endor, which was the moon where the Ewoks lived in the redwood forests. Yikes.
Still, if we thought something was so strained as to be camp, we would adopt it ourselves. We found many uses for the line “Many Bothans died to bring you this information.” I still like the sentiment in “Do. Or do not. There is no try,” because that comes directly out of George’s personality. He had spent his entire early career with people, sometimes important people, telling him, “You can’t do that.” Henry Ford had said it before, in a slightly different way: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.” I was the recipient of some of this Lucas wisdom one day when I wasn’t expecting it.
I was still pretty green when George wandered into editorial looking for my boss. “Where’s Ken?” he asked. “They’ve all gone to lunch,” I said. He asked if I could show him the shot, so I took him into the room we called “line-up” where we fashioned the effects shots on these huge old VistaVision editing machines. You could stack multiple layers of movie film, each with its own fighter craft, and run them all at once on these machines. You could also make drawings on clear acetate animation cells for planning modifications, like making all the spaceships fly in patterns. I ran the shot for him and he said something like, “Take this X-wing and blow him up, right at this frame.” For some reason I opened my mouth and said, “I don’t think we can do that.” Wrong answer. George turned to me and said, “Of course we can,” with such force that I instantly glimpsed what had got him where he was. Absolute certainty.
What did I know about blowing up spaceships? This guy had probably blown up hundreds of them, as well as destroying thousands of stormtroopers. George hadn’t been angry and he didn’t shout, but he woke me up. I had things to learn.
Most of what I learned was from my boss Ken Ralston. He was a tall, somewhat thin, twenty-eight-year-old effects director, who at first seemed somewhat young to handle all the responsibilities George had given him. He had an almost goofy cartoonist’s sense of self-deprecating humor, and he effectively shielded that he was as ambitious as any of the other star employees. He was an artist who could draw well and he always sat a drawing board, not a desk. He was quite smart and would memorize every shot, its description, and shot number on whatever movie he was working on. He won five Oscars while at ILM.
When Ken was finally hired away after twenty years by Sony Pictures Imageworks, they made him president and creative head, with what would become a multimillion-dollar salary. The head of Sony, remarking about Ken, said, “Talent loves him.” Translated from Hollywood-speak, that means that all the top directors (somewhat dismissively referred to here as “talent”) liked and respected him. Some of us noticed that the Oscars we were accustomed to winning abated for a while after Ken left.
What Ken was doing was mounting models of spaceships or even the DeLorean from Back to the Future on mechanical stands that could be controlled both by hand and by computer while filming. Our cameras rode on dollies mounted on tracks so they could swoop past, say, a mounted fighter aircraft from Star Wars or the steam engine in BTTF while the models themselves sat still, yet moved their wings or tilted.
Each frame of motion picture film was shot in a timed exposure with our camera shutters open for perhaps a second or more to capture enough light—all this in front of a large screen that was backlit a bright blue. We could then optically suck out the blue, leaving just the model to be placed against whatever background we wished. As the audience would have no frame of reference as to size, we could make believers of them when we placed, say, a star field for a space movie or a street scene for the flying car behind our models. One documentary film about how we did our work was called How to Film the Impossible, and that was about the size of it.
There was one monster shot in Return of the Jedi that I worked on with Ken that first year, called SB19. It was the nineteenth shot in the space battle and is pictured on the cover of this book. This was the shot that George had told Ken that he wanted to be a “wow” shot. Ken had set up four camera crews shooting the battling spaceships for three months just to get this shot. It contained sixty-three separate elements. I’ve never researched it, but it may have been the most complicated effects shot ever optically composited. It would take about ten hours when it came time for the final printing onto a blank piece of raw film negative as spaceships, planets, star fields, laser cannons, explosions, etc., were burned in, one at a time, rewinding the raw stock after each addition. If even the slightest error was made, you had to start all over again.
Why go to these lengths? It was a calculation. George knew how to entertain an audience and hold their attention. He would open a movie with either an action sequence like the chase in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark or the seemingly endless underbelly of the Star Destroyer in the original Star Wars to give the audience a wonderful shock of seeing what seemed to be just a glimpse of the amazing visual treats in store for them. Once the audience felt they were in the safe hands of a movie master, George could afford to introduce his characters and story points without fear of losing them. When it worked correctly, he owned the audience.
I had boxes and boxes and more boxes of film on my desk, all pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle called SB19. I hadn’t designed it or shot it; that was George, Ken, and the art director Joe Johnson’s work. But I had to put it together and some of the spaceships wouldn’t work as shot, so I manipulated them by turning their flight paths upside down. In other cases, I borrowed ships from other shots or other movies. We had tons of reusable elements from the two earlier Star Wars films. This was long before computer graphics or digital filmmaking. In a way, we just hammered on stuff until we made it work.
It took about two weeks to come up with a rough black-and-white temporary composite of the shot. We were all a little nervous about how this might go over with George. Art, who ran the editorial department at the time, said he thought we would be chewing over this shot for a long time. One of the many coordinators called George’s cutting room in the adjoining building, and he walked over to take a look. I ran it for him and he said, “Great.” That was it. His most frequent expression of approval, and I was glad to get it.
Now the arduous color compositing process began, using all the original camera negatives that had been shot, but that was someone else’s job. It took two tries to get it right, and there is still a tiny flaw in it which no one will ever see but me. It took almost a year to get that shot from start to finish, so keep that in mind if you ever see the movie. Oh, and look quickly, because it’s only two seconds long.
I had slowly started to rise out of obscurity at the company. The BBC came by and used my SB19 shot to illustrate the world of special effects in a nationally telecast program both in Britain and in the United States. They filmed Ken and me reenacting our roles. I was at the editing machines and Ken was the creative mastermind. This show helped demonstrate the complexity of creating this movie magic that was starting to change the way that motion pictures were made, marketed, and financed.