TRaFoSW: Part 8

The Rise and Fall of Star Wars, Blog #8

7/5/2017
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Postcard of SF Bay Area; Skywalker/Lucasfilm was across bridge (GG) in foreground to left, in Marin County (from the 1970s to 2005).​

The Rise of George Lucas Books

Early on, my boss, Lucy Wilson, told me that George wanted to start up his own publishing imprint, and that she and I would be working on what would be called “George Lucas Books.” His personal imprint would focus on non-Star Wars-related books, on subjects that interested him.
Our kick-off meeting was in the Main House conference room, where an almost life-sized Norman Rockwell preparatory drawing (a “cartoon”) for an oil painting of a teacher and her young class hung on one wall; a Renoir print of a little girl with pencil and paper was on another; and a painting by an artist whose signature I couldn’t make out showed kids running out of a one-room schoolhouse at the end of the day, free at last to play. Overhead was a chandelier of warm amber glass, shaped like an oblong shield.
Rick McCallum walked in, along with production controller Kathryn Ramos, and a young documentary filmmaker. Lucy and I sat at one end of the table. George arrived and I was introduced (even though I’d been to several art meetings, this book meeting was part of my normal job at Lucasfilm, so more formal; yes, it was a little weird). He sat at the other end of the table, and said that he wanted to do a book about the Northern California moviemaking community.
“This is something like The Films of San Francisco Studios,” Lucas said. “I’d like it to be categorized by studio, which is to say, Zoetrope, Lucasfilm, Fantasy Films, Pixar, and maybe PDI. It’s about our struggle to actually get these movies made; PDI also has some great struggles. These movies, no one actually wanted to make any of them.”
Accompanying the book would be a complementary documentary made by the young filmmaker, so we’d share assets and interviews. In a year or so we’d launch it and the book together to make a big splash at some big festival.
“Hollywood hasn’t picked up on it yet, still,” Lucas went on. “Down south, there’s a whole development hell they’ve created. The studio executives get involved, and too many people get involved—but we don’t do it that way up here. We make movies about more personal subjects.”
Lucas was in the mood to talk. I’d learn over the years that when he was absorbed by a subject, he could talk for a good twenty minutes in an energetic, uninterrupted patter. That afternoon was the first time I experienced it. His eyes lit up behind his black-rimmed glasses. In the early days, he’d been a skinny, beardless (then bearded) youth with a raw energy; now he was heavier with a thick neck, but was still a vibrant channel.
He told us how he and Coppola had been lured to the Bay Area by such solo moviemaking acts as John Korty and Bruce Conner, by the underground avant-garde film movements of the 1960s. By 2001, insiders would tell me that the SF film community had become more of a dark and grungy experience in dank office buildings, while, for obvious reasons, “Lucasland,” was where one reveled in “milk and honey.” There was some jealousy between the two camps, Coppola and Lucas, while Saul Zaentz’s Berkeley operation was another node, with its own reputation for making “cool” independent films, such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and, more recently, The English Patient (1996). For many film and sound editors, postproduction experts and tech “gypsies,” the three filmmaking centers of Lucas, Coppola, and Zaentz had made up a triangle of employment for decades, which triangle had later been augmented by Pixar and PDI.
Lucas then explained the subjects of his next books. He wanted one about the reality of film budgets and record-keeping; he wanted to pull back the veil on studio accounting, long a source of anguish for anyone without gross points, because films very rarely made a profit on paper. Another book would analyze the causes of death through statistics. He also was considering a book that would contrast the different ways of giving birth and raising children around the world, an idea inspired by his home assistant, Sarita Patel.
He concluded by circling back to the project that was closest to his heart, Bay Area filmmaking. “Today we’re still in trouble,” George said. “They’re still saying we’re not part of the United States. We’re in a kind of time warp here, still in the ’70s in terms of filmmaking. We still think of ourselves as independent.”
It was an interesting hour or so, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t say much if anything. But his last comment reminded me of my old neighbor Chick Callenbach and his Ecotopia. I was on familiar ground.

Big Scribbles

Lucy and I then went about trying to find the right authors for each title. In order to learn more about SF filmmakers and potential writers, we had lunch with Tom Luddy, one of the co-founders of the Telluride Film Festival, who’d been around since the early days, when he and Alice Waters (Chez Panisse restaurant founder) held salon-like dinners for visiting and local filmmakers.
We met him outside the Beaux-Arts Flatiron building known as “The Sentinel,” which joins the corners of Columbus Avenue, Kearny Street, and Jackson Street in San Francisco’s North Beach. Coppola had bought the magnificent multi-storied trapezoid, which was clad in white tile and copper (that had aged green), to be the second home of American Zoetrope back in 1973, after he’d had to shut the doors of the first Zoetrope home on Folsom.
In fact we met Coppola there, too, briefly. He was sitting at an outside table, drinking a glass of wine, no doubt made from the grapes of his Napa Valley vineyard. With Luddy, we then crossed the street and ate in a local Chinese restaurant. Unfortunately, he didn’t help much.
Back in the publishing attic of the Carriage House at Skywalker, I balanced Lucas’s new titles with my regular editorial workload, which now included a coffee-table book on his professional career, to be published by Abrams Books, a sequel to the Creative Impulse. So far I’d only shaken George’s hand and observed him in the art department; I didn’t know much about him or his work beside the obvious tropes, yet this title would be very much on his radar. So I set out to watch everything he’d done, from his student shorts to the more obscure films he’d produced (like Powaqqatsi, 1988), to every episode of Young Indy. Fortunately the ranch library had everything.
After quite a few preliminaries, such as obtaining an approved list of interviewees, we selected Marcus Hearn to be the writer, and he, after a quick visit to the States during which he talked with Lucas, quickly got to it in his London home.
Working on The Cinema of George Lucas was fun and nerve-racking. We had ample time, a patient publisher, and were able to refine each spread of the book (a spread is a two-page layout). My partner in this endeavor was art director Iain Morris, whom I suspected to have grown taller since he’d interviewed me. He hired a designer named Scott Erwert, and the three of us spent hours going over the size and placement of each image in each chapter. The anxiety producing part was getting Lucas's approval for the text, which was news to me, so the process had a few ups and downs and ups.
Another designer named Martin Venezky helped us to design the book’s cover, and wondered aloud if Lucasfilm had any archival documents that could serve as illustrations and/or inspiration. I thought this was a great idea, and asked Jane Bay if George had any handwritten notes from the early days. She told me to come over. In the office opposite hers—“The Green Room,” a waiting area with an original Alphonse Mucha on the wall—she handed me a manila folder. Inside were George’s first efforts to write the crawl for Star Wars, in pencil, along with his original treatment from 1973, and other notes he’d made on yellow legal-pad paper.
I had scans made of them, which went on to feature in the book. By including Lucas’s early graffiti, by engaging in a kind of pseudo-epigraphy, we were utilizing in the ghetto of licensed publishing a practice that was usually reserved for the more rarefied world of art history and Academic presses. Yes, licensed books generally occupy the bottom rung of the publishing ladder. And rightfully so, for licensed titles are mostly an extension of a film studio’s marketing/PR departments, which usually results in horribly made books devoid of any real content. Your average movie tie-in is nothing more than a few artworks and/or movie stills, chosen by anyone from a co-producer to an assistant hired the week before, accompanied by quotes from cast and crew saying how much they love each other. Or even, no text at all.
There was an advantage, however, to working in a publishing arena that others disdained so completely. It was liberating. No one paid any attention to what we were doing (at first). And at Lucasfilm I thought we might be able to break the mold. George was interested in books, clearly, and Rick wanted to say what making a movie was really like (though he’d often lament that we could never tell the real real story). Moreover, during that early period, getting a sense of Lucas’s personality during art department reviews, and in the launch of his own imprint, I thought he wouldn’t mind at least trying to tell an honest behind-the-scenes story.

Life at Lucasfilm III: More Perks and Day Care

Years later George would tell me that you either “Rule by fear or by love.” With his mid-sized company of 2,000 souls, he was at least attempting to do the latter, though really it was a mixture of the two. Like anyplace, there were those who “didn’t feel the love,” those with their own hang-ups and fears, and “love” is a tricky word. Lucas rarely went out of his way to talk to his employees. It wasn’t his style, and he was occupied by more pressing matters. On the other hand, he was rarely dismissive or disrespectful (I never saw it, though some have complained to me about this or that slight. Any new hire was told not to bother Lucas, or risk being fired, but that seemed to me like common sense).
His “love” was exhibited in broad strokes, in the institutions, policies, and traditions of Lucasfilm begun by himself and Marcia Lucas, though I can’t vouch for LucasArts or ILM, where things might have been different (they had their own presidents and managers, and the visual effects facility was unionized, which distanced them).
An army travels on its stomach, and, as mentioned in a previous blog, Skywalker had in its heyday four cafeterias for about 250 people. True, we were miles away from any restaurant, but four seemed generous to me. (Rancho Nicasio, about 10 minutes away, was the closest.)
Membership for the Fitness Center’s facilities, weight room and pool and sports teams, was nearly free ($50 or $70/year, I can’t remember). Later, Lucas added a tennis court. There was an indoor racquetball court and basketball court, the latter of which doubled for a pickup volleyball game twice a week. Ardees Rabang, Iain Morris, and I played; so did several folks from Sky Sound, including Ben Burtt. It was mildly competitive, but mostly comedic. David Anderman, in legal, who will figure largely in our story to come, was the most enamored of spiking. One thing most of us were good at was injuring ourselves. (Burtt decided to make a mini-documentary about our escapades, one segment of which featured our most recent debacles, in which I had a cameo with a broken bone in my foot.)
Lucasfilm provided a comparatively liberal health care package for employees—but also unusual perks, such as an annual yearbook; a frozen turkey to take home on Thanksgiving; bring-your-daughter-to-work day; and cruises on the “Seawalker,” an approximately 30-foot-long sailboat that the Lucases had purchased early on and supplied with a two-person crew. Geneviève and I, with another couple, took what I believe was its last voyage around the bay, before it was moth-balled.
Moreover, Skywalker Ranch had a day care center, a very innovative idea supplied by ILMer Rose Duignan—so new mothers or fathers could go down the hill and see their children several times a day.
Overall, it felt to me like HR and its associated operations were actually focused on creating a benevolent workplace. Every Saturday morning, there were family screenings of new movies in a Marin County theater; T-shirts, posters, and DVDs of the films were given away periodically; and they organized a unique event my first weekend there: a huge product giveaway in the parking lot of ILM.
In a lottery, I drew a low number. Those of us in that first group were each given a shopping bag and told we could also take two large items. All groups, which overlapped, had about twelve minutes. I’m not a collector or anything, but I do have nephews and nieces and neighbors (my daughters weren't really interested), and it was great: We weaved our way through a labyrinth whose six-foot walls were made from actual Star Wars products piled high, but constructed in such a way that you could take things without the whole thing collapsing (though maybe it did later on). Even after the company feeding frenzy, there was so much left over that truckloads of toys were delivered afterward to various North Bay charities.
I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture, as there were always tensions and problems behind the scenes, but the effort to create a good place to work was evident. Things would change, yet during my first few years, and long before, Lucasfilm was operating at a very high level of benign Mom-and-Pop corporatism.

Next (Friday): Attack of the Bald Clone