6/28/2017
13 Comments
A Winding Road to Lucasfilm
Circa 1988, on a summer day in a secondhand bookstore in Provincetown, Cape Cod, I happened upon Thomas G. Smith’s excellent and first-of-its-kind book Industrial Light & Magic: The Art of Special Effects. Reading through his coffee-table history during that vacation, I realized that all of the Star Wars stuff I’d forgotten about had been spun off into an immensely innovative and creative company. Page upon illustrated page revealed ILM’s groundbreaking work on such films as E.T., Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Back to the Future, and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Back in Oakland, California, where I was living—married, with a new-born—and working—one of six proofreaders at a computer book publishing company—my main occupation was figurative painting. Our living room was my studio. Because I thought my somewhat traditional style might be close to matte painting (it wasn’t), I sent my slides to Industrial Light & Magic. I had an idea that perhaps they’d teach me. A couple of weeks later, I received a letter back saying they preferred people with experience and talent, though worded more nicely.
We moved to France for most of the 1990s, because my wife, Geneviève, is half-French, half-Catalan. We started our new life with the clothes in our suitcases, and a spoon. I changed. It’s a good idea to go live somewhere else for a while if you can, if it’s necessary, and start anew. And I found myself, as the painting juice ran out, drawn more and more back toward film, the kind of things I loved as a kid. Eventually I stopped painting entirely in order to make a living. The only thing I could do over there, in the beginning, was teach English, but I was able to find a business college that needed someone to provide courses on art, any kind of art. So, in addition to literature and art history, I taught courses on Hitchcock and Spielberg. I even made some unintentionally hilarious short subjects, and tried my hand at scriptwriting.
At the end of our stay abroad I was able to find a gig as an associate producer for a videogame company called Monte Cristo Multimedia, where I wrote the live-action cut-scenes and directed the animation for one production.
At some point during that last year in France I stood in line to see the revamped Star Wars Trilogy; their showings in cinemas across Paris sold out. The movies had aged well. Although I wasn’t crazy about many of the changes Lucas had made to Star Wars, I saw them as his films—he could do with them what he wanted—and the French audiences cheered and applauded. Seeing the trilogy again on large screens with hundreds of people was energizing.
Then, partially because I wanted to work in the visual arts business, we decided to move back to the USA. We also now had two daughters, and we wanted them to grow up in America.
Professionally, it was really the film/multimedia-art connection that interested me (in particular, Lucasfilm/ILM, the one I’d read about in Smith’s book, though I didn’t seriously think I could work there). Before giving up painting, for years I’d studied the works of the Renaissance masters in churches and museums (I’d also worked at the Met, in NYC). I didn’t like abstract art, for the most part, though I appreciated what they were doing; their work seemed more like philosophy than painting. But abstract painting had been the dominant Fine Art form for a generation or two. At Parsons School of Design, where I’d gone for my freshman and sophomore years (I transferred to NYU as a junior), when I asked them about learning about anatomy, I was looked at like some kind of freak by my older drawing professor. He wanted me to be more original. Abstraction and personal expression was in; figurative and traditional was out.
By the late 1990s, it seemed that many figurative artists had gone underground, in a sense, re-becoming what they had once been: craftspeople in service of story. In the earliest paintings for churches, the stories or pictorial idea-scapes had been supplied by religion, the Bible, or a patron or an institution. As ideas about the human condition changed, painters of the 15th and 16th Century had used re-birthed ideas about perspective, mathematics, and the human form to create large-scale frescoes illustrating and interpreting those same stories—the 70mm of those times.
While those in the film business working in the traditional arts—drawing, painting, sculpting, and model-making—were not reaching the heights of the Renaissance, they were creating art that served a story. And when their work was combined with the other arts involved in making a movie—writing, acting, editing, sound design, photography, music, etc.—the totality was comparable to the works of those 16th Century masters.
So, in 1998, we moved back to the Bay Area, where I once again went in search of a more creative job. Through friends of friends, I was able to wrangle a kind of meet-and-greet with Colin Brady at Pixar Animation in Point Richmond, where he toured me through rooms overflowing with artwork and storyboards for Toy Story 2, which at that time was going to be a TV movie. (Brady was going to direct; when the movie became a theatrical feature, Lasseter replaced him as director.) I was impressed and liked the atmosphere, one of fun and joy in what they were doing. But I had no skills that fit into their world (those guys could really draw!).
I eventually found employment as the managing editor of GamePro, a videogame magazine (located about six blocks away from the old Rolling Stone offices), with the long-term of goal of finding a place at a studio that was actually making a film or videogame. During my second year there, I was told that a place called Skywalker Ranch existed, a kind of Xanadu. Because I was reviewing movies for GamePro’s online website, I was able to talk Alex Laurant, an art director at ILM, into giving me a tour of the facility so I could write about their work in The Mummy Returns (2001). What I saw convinced me that Lucasfilm was really the place to be: all kinds of artists in a vast workshop setting were doing a variety of creative jobs. Perhaps because my frame of reference was the Renaissance, I saw ILM as a modern-day guild environment—but on an even grander scale, using the latest techniques, down to inventing their own tools, even grinding lenses for revolutionary cameras. Taking a few steps back, I saw parallels between Lucas and the Florentine patrons. As the founder of ILM, LucasArts, THX, Skywalker Sound, the director of American Graffiti, and the creator of the Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises, he was spawning a similar revolution in the arts. From what I could tell, he had a similar love for the Humanities, combined with a knowledge of composition, a similar interest in the past, in the Classics, a love of rhythm which came through in the editing, in the music, and in the forms going across the two-dimensional surface of his films—a spirit was shared by this kid from Modesto and those earlier patrons of that glorious City State.
Not only did he have a forward-thinking company, a whole freakin’ all-star roster of artists and groundbreaking technicians, Lucas was back making movies—Episode I: The Phantom Menace had just come out and I’d really liked it, as had my older daughter, who was about 11 at the time. And, believe me, I don’t say I liked Episode I lightly, because I know that people whom I respect find this baffling. However, I find their inability to see past a few flaws to the greater achievements of Episode I to be equally baffling. My daughter and I attended a preview of the movie in SF, so in that brief moment before the backlash and after, none of the government or trade blockade material bothered me; in fact I found it interesting—true, Jar Jar and some of the jokes were not to my taste, but neither had the Ewoks been a rousing success—and it was great enough to see Jedi in their prime (though, clearly, representing a flawed Order, which was also intriguing); Liam Neeson was good; Darth Maul was a fantastic villain; the art direction was beautiful (it would’ve been redundant to see the same universe as before, given that it’s a different galactic time period); and the Podrace—a showstopper—was a symphony in sound design, like the speeder-bike chase in Jedi. I was ready for the sequel—and I wanted to be there, involved. (More on the quality of the Prequels later.)
So I applied to LucasArts, the videogame arm of Lucas’s company. No dice. I sent in two or three other applications for Lucasfilm jobs that I was probably unqualified for. I had a telephone interview for a position on the short-lived website, starwarskids.com. Nope, nope, and nope. In the year 2001, anyone could easily see what positions were available by logging onto Lucasfilm’s website. One as “editor” came up. This time, my online application resulted in an almost immediate call back from Human Resources (HR). I was invited to interview at Skywalker Ranch.
Wearing a suit jacket and a Tintin tie (I also really like Hergé), I checked in at the Stable House, where a nice woman named Julia Cardinale in HR told me to lose the jacket. Lucasfilm wasn’t that kind of place. I was scheduled to meet with Lucy Autrey Wilson, Director of Publishing, in the Carriage House (both houses were brown shingled, at the back of Skywalker, abutting the hills).
A little about Lucy Wilson. In 1974, she was working in La Jolla, San Diego, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in the machine shop as a bookkeeper. Her sister was working for Tong & Fong. Her sister’s boss, Richard Tong was the accountant for George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. “My sister got Richard to recommend me for the job at Lucasfilm, sight unseen,” Wilson says. “Richard didn’t know me. I think he assumed if I was related to my sister, who was good at her job, I must be good also.”
Tong was right. Wilson went to work in the San Anselmo office, known as Parkway House—which consisted of producer Gary Kurtz; Bunny Alsup, who was Kurtz’s sister-in-law and his assistant; and founder George Lucas—and by the time I arrived for my interview, Lucy was considered Lucasfilm’s #1 corporate hire, and was the company’s longest-serving employee. Part of her job back in 1974 was to do some production accounting, but her main responsibility was maintaining corporate accounts and performing other office tasks, like typing, etc. (Later, Lucy’s sister would go to work for Coppola.)
Wilson therefore typed up all Lucas’s handwritten pages into the scripts for Star Wars, as she says, “over and over in various iterations,” from rough draft, to revisions, to fourth draft. She played volleyball with the next few hires, helped cook meals, and did whatever else was needed.
When Lucasfilm expanded and Lucas hired an executive assistant, Jane Bay, Wilson moved over to ILM for a while, in San Rafael, taking a position in the corporate accounting department offices, sitting for a while in “B” Building, then in the Bel Marin office next door to what would become the Pixar folks, before moving to Skywalker Ranch circa 1986, still in accounting. “It was after we moved to the ranch that Howard Roffman hired me to join the new licensing group he was putting together (the old group under Maggie Young had mostly all left by then),” Wilson says.
Lucy became the Director of Publishing in the newly formed licensing group, and that’s one of the things I would learn to really appreciate about Lucasfilm. People were not pigeon-holed. A gardener could become a film editor. An editor, a writer. A secretary, president of ILM. An accountant, head of publishing.
Roffman was reforming the department because by 1986, licensing and publishing were moribund, having fizzled out in 1983 with the last published Star Wars spin-off novel. Star Wars was so dead—despite the Ewok movies and cartoons—that licensing sought out other properties, even doing Grateful Dead tie-in comic books. In an attempt to revive at least the book business, Wilson convinced Roffman to ask Lucas on her behalf if he’d agree to her seeking out a publisher to do a new Star Wars novel, to create a new Star Wars story. “George said okay,” Wilson says, “with the caveat that we could only develop the period after Return of the Jedi. I don’t think he thought it would amount to much. Nor did anyone else, or they wouldn’t have let me do it.”
With Wilson driving it, and published by Bantam, author Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire hit and stayed at #1 in 1991. Not only did it jump-start LucasBooks, helped along by Dark Horse Comics’ Dark Empire series, it ignited a Star Wars renaissance. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Lucas and others at Lucasfilm were surprised. Lucas took notice of his creation’s uninterrupted popularity. He may have started thinking seriously about making more Star Wars movies. ILM’s digital effects for Jurassic Park, two years later, provided the final push.
By the time I arrived for my interview, Lucas and Lucasfilm were in the middle of making Episode II: Attack of the Clones—licensing had exploded and publishing was thriving. The book division was doing so well in fact that Wilson was looking to expand into nonfiction more seriously. That day in her office, which looked onto a shady porch, I sat opposite my potential boss. Poised, she had sandy hair and glasses, and asked, “What do you think of the Expanded Universe?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
This was the sort of right answer. The “Expanded Universe” referred to spinoff Star Wars material—books, comic books, videogames, roleplaying games, toys, etc.—things that would have excited the average fan, but which meant nothing to me. I was interested only in the films, which was fortunate, because Wilson had learned that diehard fans were often not dispassionate enough to do effective work.
I then interviewed with several more folks in publishing, including book designer Iain Morris, a younger, giant of an Englishman, whose handshake crushed several bones in my hand. Strangely, he liked my Tintin tie.
I didn’t hear anything for a week or two, but I’d made up my mind to accept a pay cut if offered (for I’d be moving backward from managing editor to editor), in order to work at such an amazing place. During my day there, I’d been impressed by Wilson, Morris, the people, and the environment.
On September 11, 2001, after taking the bus to the GamePro offices south of Mission, I had to flee San Francisco back to Petaluma, taking the ferry because the Golden Gate Bridge had been closed for security reasons. Geneviève picked me up at the Larkspur terminal and we drove home, shaken to our bones, like everyone else. I called my older brother, Ben, who lived in NYC and he told me of the black smoke he’d seen pouring down the avenues.
Late that morning the phone rang. It was Julia from Lucasfilm HR. “I know it’s a terrible, sad day,” she said. “But we wanted to make it a slightly better day for at least one person: You got the job.”
It was impossible to be happy, but it was welcome news.
Next (Friday): Exploring Skywalker Ranch
Peter Paul Ruben's 1603 copy of the lost Battle of Anghiari fresco-size drawing by da Vinci--Battle for the Standard.
No comments:
Post a Comment