TRaFoSW: Part 9

The Rise and Fall of Star Wars, Blog #9

7/7/2017
14 Comments


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Opening of one of Lucas's student films. The word means "freedom."​

Modern Times

My behind-the-scenes work included going down to Industrial Lights & Magic for the visual effects dailies, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Lucas had already wrapped principal photography on Episode II and was in the midst of postproduction. ILM was deep into about a two thousand shots. The trickiest involved a climactic duel between Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) and Yoda, who was going to be digitally animated for the first time instead of being puppeteered by Frank Oz (who would still supply the voice).
Their fight looked iffy. My first day at Lucasfilm I’d been given a VHS tape of the rough cut to watch on a small TV—please note: this was my first day, but they shared what is often jealously guarded on film productions—a complete view of a work-in-progress. When the story got to the Yoda/Dooku confrontation, all I could see was a tiny wisp of a creature darting and cartwheeling around a old man flailing with a lightsaber. Everyone, even animation director Rob Coleman, was a little worried about it.
But on my first visits to ILM, the atmosphere was relaxed, congenial, the place I’d seen in the pages of Thomas G. Smith’s book come to life. As hundreds if not thousands of online and magazine articles have observed, ILM did not advertise itself; there was no sign outside. Instead, its modest entrance was hidden behind a plain glass office door with “Kerner Optical” marked on it. If it had been otherwise, there would have been an endless flow of fans, visual effects aficionados, and cinéphiles on pilgrimage trying to get in.
Rick McCallum had suggested I give John Knoll a call. John was one of the visual effects supervisors (vfx supes) on the Prequel Trilogy, with a deep voice and goatee, an analytical view of life, and an abiding, deep respect for all aspects of the facility and its history. John once told me that he was concerned about today’s children because they didn’t want to know how everything functioned. Whereas throughout his life, he’d wanted to figure things out, including, at age 14, how movie tricks and effects were accomplished. He’d therefore studied them at length—yet when Star Wars came out, he hadn’t been able to name all the techniques behind its incredible shots. Consequently, on a visit to the Los Angeles area with his father in 1978, Knoll had persuaded Grant McCune, head of the model shop at that time, to let him come visit what had been the ILM facility/warehouse in Van Nuys. Knoll spent the day there. Having completed Star Wars, McCune, John Dykstra, and others had formed another company called Apogee and were working on the TV show Battlestar Galactica. Seeing these regular Joes in their ragged environment, John had reasoned, If they can do it, so can I. (I should add that John, with his brother, Thomas, also created Photoshop, so…)
More than 20 years later, John was touring me around the 2001 iteration of the model shop, where men and women were painting, sawing, hammering, sculpting, and using machines I’d never seen before. We walked through one studio after another, once through a “door” freshly knocked through a wall with sledgehammers.
“ILM is kind of like a rabbit warren,” John explained.
The facility’s sprawl took up several buildings, about a whole block's worth, and it was always being re-routed, expanding and collapsing with the needs of new “shows” and changing technology.
The most radical recent development had been the gradual, then sudden emergence of digital effects. Lucas had championed them, bankrolling advances at ILM as he had at Sky Sound, since founding The Computer Division in 1979. That day, I saw glimpses of their digital pipeline while walking past folks at computers rigging animated aliens and far-out creatures. On the walls and hanging from the ceilings were remnants of previous films: an E.T., the starship Enterprise, model cars from Men In Black, a dragon, a wampa, a miniature DeLorean. I could have spent the whole day there and not seen half of it.
Like me, John had applied to ILM and been rejected. Unlike me, he’d been hired the second time he applied and had since taped the first rejection letter to his office door for anyone to read. At the small company store, I bought an ILM mug (which I still have).
The whole place was informal. Studio areas were plastered with in-jokes, drawings and more drawings, funny signs, sculpts, photos, and souvenirs from old scale-model sets. There was also an underlying current of stress. It was intense work, and deadlines and money were always tight. Yet it wasn’t a public company. Ultimately ILM answered only to Lucas. So the different currents merged and overlapped, and vied for attention, but the people I met were in good spirits. Many had been there for a long time, such as model shop supervisor Lorne Peterson, a bearded, wavy-haired giant, who was almost deaf in one ear. Back in 1975, he’d had to choose between two jobs: sculpting enormous hamburgers for McDonald’s, or helping out part-time on some kind of sci-fi flick at an obscure facility.
“ILM is like a miniature Florence during the Renaissance,” Peterson told me, confirming what I’d felt years before.
After taking in the sights—notably, the Howard Anderson Optical Printer, a relic of the facility’s celluloid years—on the way to the theater in “C” building, adjacent to the soundstage, John joined McCallum, Rob Coleman, Tiemens, Church, vfx supes Pablo Helman and Ben Snow, and others who always attended dailies, sitting near or around Lucas. A few of the core group had known each other for quite a while and had made many breakthroughs together. They would attend each other’s weddings and significant birthday parties. A few were part of the original team that had changed the cinematic world and then some.
I sat nearby so I could hear what they were saying and do my job of reporting for an in-progress book I was editing. At the foot of the stadium seating, in a corner near the screen, an R2 unit had been placed next to a totem-pole–like listing of movies for which ILM had been nominated or received an Oscar, from Star Wars at the bottom, rising through Raiders of the Lost Ark and Terminator 2: Judgment Day up to 2001’s nominees, Pearl Harbor and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence—around 20 in all.
Dailies might include a couple dozen or more shots that Lucas would either approve or alter, not taking more than 30 to 45 minutes. A digital shot of Yoda, with his hair unattached to his head, made people laugh. But Yoda’s fight shots with Dooku were slowly improving.
Seeing white-armored ghost-like troopers advancing through a multicolored haze of lazer fire, Lucas said enthusiastically, “Now that’s the Clone Wars!”
Looking back and knowing more now, I can say that I was viewing the tail-end of a long tradition in which ideas were relatively free to flow. The atmosphere in 2001–02 was more uptight than in 1976, but still functional. Knoll or Muren or nearly anyone in the theater could offer up ideas or critiques. If it was going to slow down the process, or cost more money, they’d be at risk from McCallum, but people weren’t overly shy, and Lucas listened. At least, that’s the way it seemed to me. (In all these observations, the rule of Rashomon is in play… And note: Rick would tell me that he’d found ILM, back in the 1990s, to be mired in tradition, and that he’d had a difficult time pushing through Lucas’s digital agenda, etc. Conversely, I got the feeling that some ILM folks resented Rick’s forays into their areas of expertise as well—but that’s a subject for those who were in the trenches.)
John Lasseter, now head of animation at Disney/Pixar, has often said that he learned from his time within Lucasfilm’s embryonic Computer Division. He’d been allowed to sit in on ILM dailies during the mid-1980s and had seen how a certain give-and-take was promoted. Lasseter took those lessons across the Bay to Pixar and established a brain trust there, where competing ideas and critiques were also encouraged.
Oddly enough I was being allowed to sit in, the kind of neophyte most studios would never let within a hundred yards of their dailies. Yet here, nobody cared, as long as I didn’t do or say something irretrievably stupid.
At the end of one séance George and Rick stayed behind in “C” theater after dailies, and invited me to stay, too. Lucas was prepping for a series of pickups for THX 1138, his early film which had combined a dry sometimes twisted humor with a futuristic dystopian society, topping it off with a high-speed chase through an underground city. It had been his first feature, but in line with his shorts, another story about individual liberation and potential salvation. As he’d done with his original Star Wars trilogy, he wanted to add some shots digitally in order to conform to his original vision: for instance, a new shot of a vehicle racing through the metropolis.
Sitting there, watching the film go by, George said, “This is the movie most like me.”
In his early days, Lucas had figured he’d go into animation or fringe documentary filmmaking. After THX, he’d changed tact, but, based on comments like these, I came to understand that a big part of him remained the artsy, rebellious graduate student who disdained narrative and dialogue. Indeed, after watching his shorts and while re-viewing the four Star Wars films for my new job, I noted aspects that are absent from run-of-the-mill blockbusters: long segments featuring only Ben Burtt’s sound design or John Williams’ music; odd framings; emotional dislocation; and nontraditional story lines, such as showing Darth Vader as a little boy growing up—the choice and execution of which had initiated a shock wave of revulsion among certain movie-goers that continues to this day.
That day, McCallum mentioned to Lucas that Episode II, the first blockbuster to be recorded entirely with digital cameras, would also be projected digitally, as planned—but only in about 20 movie theaters, up from two (or four, George told me) for Episode I. The other 3,000 or so theaters would project the film the usual way, on celluloid. Rick’s comment prompted a mini-rant. Movie-chain owners were unimaginative, risk-averse people, Lucas said, who would have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the digital age. (More on this later...)

Coda

As she did for all such events, Jane Bay supervised the company party for Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones, whose décor was inspired by her trip to Lake Como during the location shoot. Her visit had happened to coincide with the kiss between Anakin and Padmé on a veranda, overlooking a stunning Italian garden and the lake. A photograph she took of the scene therefore became the basis for an installation at Fort Mason, at the time the biggest Lucasfilm event ever. After seeing the movie in one of the 12 theaters around the Bay Area reserved for us employees, my family and I joined about five thousand people who came to enjoy the post-release glow in the extravagant party setting. Though many at Lucasfilm were critical of the movie, at least it was over. Product was out there, all of our Episode II books, published.
During a business trip to New York City a week later, I went to a movie theater to watch the film again. I wanted to see how people were reacting to it. During the climax, when tall Dooku turned to see who had dared enter his hideout—and saw small Yoda, who pulls out his lightsaber before launching into their peripatetic fight—the audience cheered. (Likewise, more on prequels later...)

Next: Bald for THX