TRaFoSW: Part 7

The Rise and Fall of Star Wars, Blog #7

7/4/2017
7 Comments



Note: In honor of July 4, seems like a good idea to post this one, which includes a bit about Lucasfilm’s July 4 picnics (below, after main text)…

I Was a Secret Mole-Man

Rick and I decided that I would find a writer who would become part of the on-set team. Because that hiring process would take a while, I’d begin taking notes at the first Episode III preproduction art meetings, for the author to use later on. To learn the ropes, I’d attend Episode II dailies at ILM.
It happened fast.
That’s how my second, more interesting job at Lucasfilm commenced, which I owe to Rick. We’d be at odds later, but at that moment, the reputed ogre of Lucasfilm had transformed himself into my mercurial fairy godfather.
When I told Lucy what we planned to do, the kind of book I wanted to make, she spoke to Howard Roffman about it. A small, careful man, with grey hair cut short, Howard was Lucasfilm’s éminence gris: not only the head of licensing, the company’s cash cow and economic lynchpin, but also influential in other spheres. Having performed in various critical capacities since 1980, and having come to know Lucas well, he had a say on many topics.
I wasn’t sure how they’d react, thinking I may have overstepped my bounds, but he and Lucy went along with it. (Subsequent experience would teach me that no one was going to go up against Rick. Also, the wants and needs of Production trumped those of every other department.) However, I was told to keep it quiet.
For a while, I would lead a kind of double-life at Lucasfilm. I’d take a secret staircase from the editors’ attic—probably meant to be an old-fashioned maid’s staircase—which allowed me to leave the Carriage House without being seen. In the Main House, a second secret staircase ascended from the library mezzanine, past framed artwork by Al Williamson, to the third floor. There, a more spacious attic stretched the entire length of the house in a kind of “H” shape, its main corridor maybe 30 yards long, opening into two rectangular spaces on either end. The concept art studio occupied one side, with drawing boards and computers somewhat cramped together. On the walls were pinned sheets of imaginative character, location and vehicle concept drawings from Episodes I and II. The other side of the attic was empty, but would be occupied later by the animatics squad.
It was on the concept art side that I attended the earliest sessions with Lucas and his two concept design supervisors, Erik Tiemens and Ryan Church, laying out in a few words his earliest ideas for Revenge of the Sith. A mellow native of Santa Cruz, Tiemens was also an accomplished landscape painter; Church excelled at vehicle design. Both of them were fantastic artists and fast, able to produce several conceptual artworks a day. Sculptor Robert Barnes was also there from the get-go, a kinky-haired art school graduate whose first job had been as an intern at ILM; thanks to his expressive concept sculpts he’d segued into the Prequel Trilogy art department. Not long afterward we started carpooling together.
“We might see the Wookiee planet in this one,” Lucas said at an early meeting. “We might see a teenage Boba Fett.”
That kind of brief was enough for them until next week. Every Friday, Lucas would come round, walking up the stairs from his office. During these sessions, I’d simply stand to the side, a human fly on the wall. Rick had told George I’d be there, but we didn’t exchange a word. I’d been told that he was shy, but it felt more like focus. He was making a movie and we were along for the ride.

Life at Lucasfilm II: Parties

The words apart from “dysfunctional” that many ranch denizens used to describe Lucasfilm was, a “Mom and Pop Shop.” In Lucasfilm’s semi-familial, not-always-corporate way of doing things, George was Pop, and Mom might have been Marcia at one time, but had become Jane Bay, who had a significant say in how things were done, organizing the big July 4 picnics, Christmas parties and associated gifts for many years.
Jane first met George at the 1974 Academy Awards, when she double-dated with Tom Pollock, Lucas’s attorney, and Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. The latter two had co-written American Graffiti, which had been nominated for five Oscars that year, and would later polish the Star Wars script. That evening, Lucas and his friends left the award show empty handed, and Bay would remember that at the Governor’s Ball George was in a “grumpy mood.” Three years later, Bay became one of his very first hires, when Lucas needed a kind of office manager at Parkway House.
Since then Bay had become his executive assistant and essential to his work life. She would print up his daily schedule on a card he carried in his wallet; she would handle interoffice mail, myriad appearance requests, and a 1,001 other jobs.
Jane also masterminded, with a lot of help from Ranch Operations, the tremendous July 4 picnics, a nice tradition and open to the whole company and their families. The first picnic in 1978 had consisted of a few tables with red-checkered tablecloths and about 20 guests, and was held in the outdoor kitchen area of the deer club, in the canyon behind where the Main House would eventually be built (in days of yore, Bull Tail Ranch had an annual deer hunts and dinners). Because the picnics grew in size and their activities multiplied, by the late 1980s Bay moved the locale to the meadow in front of the Main House. In addition to volleyball, horseshoe pitches, and late-night dancing, guests such as Harrison Ford and concert promoter Bill Graham played softball. The picnic also became a regular Bay Area filmmaking community get-together, with Coppola, Zaentz, sound designer and editor Walter Murch, editor and DP Robert Dalva, director Phil Kaufman, and the usual Zoetrope veterans and old friends attending.
By 2002, the picnic was so popular that Jane had been moved it once again, this time to a larger field next to the baseball diamond where a giant tent was constructed for perhaps 50 long tables and a few thousand people, who would participate in an egg toss, a tug-of-war, a potato-sack race, as well as other games and paddle-boating on Ewok Lake. For the children, there was face-painting and pony rides. The ranch supplied the main courses—BBQ pork, hamburgers, hot dogs, and corn and beans—while we brought homemade salads. For desert, an ice-cream truck always had long, happy lines. Once I was with my family sitting under a tree to escape the intense heat, when a volunteer strolled over to offer us slices of apple pie, for which we were very grateful.
The Christmas parties had a similar growth trajectory. They started as small dinners at Parkway and the Main House, then grew over the years to about 400 people at the Carriage Room at the Palace Hotel in SF. People would dress up (ILMer Rose Duignan attended one in an 18th Century–style gown and wig). Another took place in the Tech Building, with a Dickensian theme. By the time I attended a Christmas party in 2001, a whole division of the company had worked for months to prepare a warehouse the size of a Boeing airplane hangar south of Mission, the only space big enough for the two thousand employees and their plus ones.
“I don’t know anybody at the parties anymore,” George told his old accountant Richard Tong.
Each party had elaborate themes, such as 1970s disco, World Travel, or Riverboat Gambling. One year, we could ride an actual indoor roller coaster; another time there was a rollerskating rink (where I nearly killed myself); employees could play with fake money at poker and blackjack tables; there were over the years photo booths, arcade machines, carnival tents, dancing, various bands, guest performers, even long, thick snakes. At these more adult affairs, alcohol flowed and the volume was often deafening, so Genevieve and I usually left early. But it was fun.
Lucas would also give Christmas presents to Lucasfilm employees. Bay would plan these and they, too, were often elaborate: for instance, a Western-themed wooden box, with the initials “SR” branded into its side, containing a Western dime-novel, leather coasters, and cowboy coffee.
ILM’s Halloween party was also a tradition, held on its soundstage, where countless effects moments had been filmed. Because awards were given for best group costume, best individual costume, etc., model makers would often go all out. I saw one arrive with a functioning carousel built around him, actually revolving with multicolored lights flickering, music playing, and horses going up and down. The prizes were fantastic, too, because sponsors sought favor with the facility. The top three might go to the experts, but if you could come up with something clever, the panel of judges might give you, say, sixth prize. A friend of mine walked away with some sort of Dolby sound system worth thousands of dollars. Those who wanted to compete could shuffle across a runway stage.
All of the above was part of the fabric of Lucasfilm, the “Mom and Pop Shop” that was also a billion-dollar corporation.

Next: The Rise of George Lucas Books

TRaFoSW: Part 6

The Rise and Fall of Star Wars, Blog #6

7/3/2017
13 Comments


Into the Maelstrom

Our small publishing department was in the attic of the Carriage House (Lucy’s office was on the groundfloor). The rest of licensing occupied the two floors below, having moved over from the Brook House in 1987. Apart from myself, there was long-time editor Sue Rostoni, who handled the novels (and eventually the comic books), and Chris Cerasi and Michelle Vuckovich, who started about a month before me. Everyone would stash their cars in the underground parking lot and come up through a basement, which, intriguingly, housed a Foley stage and some sort of sound editing/mixing board. Hidden technology was one of the themes at the ranch, though in this case it was also a matter of necessity: At Lucas’s request, Foley had been moved out of the Tech Building to make room for the first digital sound studio, which Ben Burtt and his crew had used for Episode I (later, Foley would be moved back into the basement of the Tech Building).
Up a flight of stairs from Foley, licensing was made up of about 35 men and women in offices or at desks in an open-floor plan. What I found to be a funny, but endearing aspect of my new working environment was that nothing—well, hardly anything—was designed for business. Some of the managers were business-like, even corporate, but the place itself felt like a home.
“The Main House was built by a retired sea captain,” Jo Donaldson, the ranch’s long-time librarian, told me.
Jo and had taken over years before from the first ranch librarian/archivist, Debbie Fine, and we were standing in their abode, one of the more beautiful libraries in the world, the jewel of the Main House. A stained-glass dome capped a fantastic chamber dominated by a spiral redwood staircase to a mezzanine. Behind her were framed photographs of the ranch cats. Always patient and helpful, Jo pointed to a bank of nautical instruments embedded in dark wood paneling, and I recognized a barometer.
Around us, bookshelves were crammed with titles reflecting the subjects and needs of Lucas’s films: furniture and costume design; world history, anthropology, psychology, evolution, and religion; but also UFO-ology and esoteric subjects, such as the Nazi’s use of occult magic. Anyone at Lucasfilm could check out books if they had a legitimate business reason for doing so. Jo and one or two assistants at the library also provided research and reference services to outside clients (for example, the productions of J. Edgar, Lincoln, The Great Gatsby, Iron Man, Memoirs of a Geisha, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Moulin Rouge, Chicago, etc.)
“What about the Carriage House and the Gate House?” I asked.
“George told the architects that the four houses behind the Main House were built by the sea captain’s children. That’s why their architectural styles are different from the Victorian style here. One of the grandchildren built the Tech Building.” (I also heard that this son, or grandson, was a rebel, who planted the vineyard and went into the wine business.)
Above the library fireplace was an original Maxfield Parrish painting. Jo told me that when Lucas had first revealed his showplace to Steven Spielberg, the latter had remarked that it was a little hard to see the painting. That same afternoon workers installed recessed lights in the ceiling.
“George wrote down a whole story,” Jo added, “to explain to everyone involved, the builders and architects, why one building was a certain style, or different from another.”
I never saw his written story, but it was consistent with his way of working, which often integrated history, art, fairy tales, and family sagas. Even many of the ranch’s bathrooms were like those you might find in a house of the period, with claw-foot tubs and wooden cabinets. Lucas figured that the tubs and showers would be useful if anyone had to work overnight.
The unintended humor of the ranch’s non-utilitarian character meant that us four editors in the attic had nice oak desks, perfect for typewriters, but not our hulking PCs and wide keyboards that hogged their surface space. Whenever illustrated pages came in, I’d go into the hallway and sit on the floor to lay them out. Nor did we have file cabinets. Instead, we had a complex system of loose papers piled high on a shelf. Strong winds were dangerous, but we had to keep the windows open, because people were never meant to stay nine or ten hours a day in that attic: we sweated through the summer and shivered during the winter. During the former season’s very hot days, the attic’s roughly 15-foot-long glass wall converted our workspace into a greenhouse, in which we were the desiccated orchids.
It didn’t help that, in my enthusiasm to sign up for everything offered at the ranch, I wound up playing intramural softball, which I’d never played before, and dislocated my knee. In the second game I had to be rescued by the Fire Department and bandaged up. I was on crutches for the next few weeks, hobbling up and down the Carriage House staircase.
It was in this sorry condition that I made a discovery: As the newly hired nonfiction editor, I was in charge of behind-the-scenes books—and my first “mission” was to discuss a recently submitted manuscript with Prequel Trilogy Producer Rick McCallum, which was the equivalent of drawing the short straw. McCallum was widely feared, for he was volatile. In some quarters, he was ... not liked. Former assistants had hidden beneath their desks when he was on one of his rampages.
My first day during lunch in the Main House dining room, at the table next to ours, I’d spotted McCallum with Lucas, composer John Williams, and actress Carrie Fisher. I noted then that Rick resembled physically a more charming Quasimodo. He’d let himself go a little, but had the hunched large shoulders and upper body of an Olympic swimmer, which he’d nearly been*. He’d also been a daring young producer in the UK, though American, who was written up by Italian tabloids as having an affair with actress Elizabeth Taylor on one of his first film experiences as an assistant director on location in Rome. (The Driver's Seat, 1974; Rick's step-father, Michael York, wrote that the tabloids were in error.)
Apart from his reputation, I had another problem. Upon reading the manuscript, although it was a solid piece of journalism, it wasn’t my cup of tea. Its author, however, was a friend of McCallum’s. This last fact was related to me by someone who hastened to add that I was, “screwed.”
I sent the pages over to Rick with a note asking him to let me know when he was ready to talk. About a week later I was summoned by his assistant, Ardees Rabang, who, like Radar on M.A.S.H., often knew what Rick wanted before he did (and wasn't intimidated by him either). Rabang always made three copies of every document: one for Rick, one for the files, and one for when Rick lost the first one.
The day of our rendezvous, I climbed the wide, carpeted, curved staircase of the Main House—something out of Gone with the Wind—up to McCallum’s office, not sure what I was going to say. On the second floor, to the left were Jane Bay’s office, that of her assistant, Anne Merrifield, and Lucas’s suite, neither of which I’d yet to glimpse. This was my first trip to the inner-sanctum, off limits to anyone without good reason or an invitation. To the right of the staircase was Rick’s lair, so producer and director had easy access to each other.
In the anteroom, I was told to wait. McCallum was on the phone. I was apprehensive, but felt that he had been type-cast. McCallum couldn’t be all one way. No one was.
After about 30 minutes, Ardees showed me in. I saw various awards on shelves; on the fireplace mantel a few high-end Star Wars replicas; on the coffee-table, assorted foreign cinema magazines—and books. Several art and photography books, which was reassuring.
Rick was behind a massive desk on another call. I sat down opposite. That day and on many subsequent occasions, he was not shy about letting it all hang out, no matter who might be on the other end, no matter what business was being discussed, no matter how angry or beseeching he might be. “Honey, I know…,” he was saying (anyone could be “Honey”). “Just help us out… yeah, I know.”
He hung up, looked at me, and said, “The book’s pretty boring, isn’t it.”
“Yes, it is.”
“What can we do about it?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s too late. But for the next one, we could tell the story of production, talk about the real drama of making a movie, follow it from day one up to the release of the film. Preproduction, on the sets, editing—everything.”
“Okay,” Rick smiled. “Let’s do it.”

Next: I Was a Secret Mole-Man

* See Michael York's autobiography, Accidentally on Purpose. His book is a good read, too.

And please note, as I mentioned before: This blog is about my time at Lucasfilm, from October 1, 2001, to December 31, 2015. As such, though I’ll try to be objective, my observations are no doubt my subjective views of these years and people, not any clinical “truth.”

TRaFoSW: Part 5

The Rise and Fall of Star Wars, Blog #5

6/30/2017
10 Comments

An old photo of the Winchester House, south of San Francisco, in San Jose.
In the Valley

When we’d moved to Petaluma a few years before, I wasn’t even sure if George Lucas’s ranch existed. But Geneviève and I had been attracted to the relatively small city of 50,000 people in the North Bay, about 45 minutes from SF, by its several bookstores; comic book store; two cinemas; and its general feel. It seemed like a great place to raise two girls.
The “West Side” of Petaluma—west of the 101 Freeway—was even smaller: beautiful neighborhoods of Queen Anne, Victorian, and Arts-and-Crafts houses, shaded by old oak trees, and in walking distance of one of the more well-preserved downtowns in America. Petaluma had been spared the big earthquake of 1906; its 19th Century architecture was still intact, and its main drag, Petaluma Boulevard, hadn’t changed much since the 1960s, with many of the original storefronts and signage preserved. It was for this reason that Lucas had fled to Petaluma in 1972 to shoot American Graffiti. He’d originally intended to make his movie about cruising, music, and leaving home on the streets of San Rafael (his home town of Modesto had already changed too much to be a candidate), about 20 miles south, but that city, after complaints from local merchants on the first night of filming, had kicked him out. By the second night, he and his actors—Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, Cindy Williams, et al—and his small crew were up and running in Petaluma (which, consequently, has an American Graffiti Day each year in May, during which classic cars cruise the downtown, with music from the 1950s and 1960s piped through outdoor speakers).
Petaluma also turned out to be the most affordable city a short commute from Skywalker, about 30 minutes, and a number of Lucasfilm employees called it home at that time, from concept artists Iain McCaig and Robert Barnes, to image archives manager Tina Mills and starwars.com guru Pablo Hidalgo, to the head of fan relations and owner of the largest Star Wars memorabilia collection in the world, Steve Sansweet. Over the next decade, I would be fortunate enough to get to know them.
Our house was in “Old East Petaluma”—that is, west of the freeway, but east of the train tracks that originally divided the town—which was a working class neighborhood. On one corner of our block was a big brick building that contained a twine factory, which went out of business shortly after our arrival and remained sadly derelict for many years. On the opposite corner was a thoroughfare, with a local bar opposite a garden nursery, where East ‘D’ Street ran straight out of town, going west into the rolling hills and turning into more of a road as it crossed from Sonoma County into Marin County. After several curvy miles, commuters to the ranch would make a left turn into the small village of Nicasio, past a baseball field, an old church, and into a sharp turn—where at least once a year someone would be driving too fast and would smash through the fence into the field beyond. Another left took you onto Lucas Valley Road.
(Lucas Valley Road isn’t named after George Lucas. In the 1880s, rancher John Lucas inherited much of the valley as a wedding present from his uncle, an earlier settler, and the road was named after him. Besides, the Marin County Board of Supervisors would have collectively thrown themselves off a cliff rather than name something after George Lucas. More on that later…)
My first few weeks, I drove alone over those backroads to Skywalker Ranch (later, I’d carpool). Motoring along the slow curves of the Lucas Valley thruway, with the sun’s rays filtering through the high branches of redwood trees on either side, like light cascading through dark-green stained-glass windows, I was pretty sure I’d be fired. Because of the many identical-looking turns on the two-lane road, I also had an irrational fear of driving past the ranch entrance. Luckily, a bank of rusty mailboxes on an old trestle, and the sudden absence of telephone or electrical wires overhead—Lucas had paid to put them underground, to enhance the natural setting—warned me each day that I was approaching.
Passing through a heavy wooden gate that swung open automatically, I’d go by the kiosk and wave to one of the ranch’s Fire Department. Security was light, or seemed that way (there were rumors of cameras hidden in fake rocks up on the hills). Lucas hadn’t hired an outside company to protect his facility; Fire Department members, some of whom had worked there for many years, felt like part of the ranch family, or the “dysfunctional family,” as some called it.
I’d prefer “benevolently strange family,” because it did function. One sign of its oddity was the etiquette involved in slowly driving past the ranch’s white two-story Victorian-style Main House, which was more like a country manor: We had to take the far edge of the house’s circular driveway, passing round a magnolia tree, for we’d been told that taking the closer rim over the paving stones would disturb Lucas, who was busy in his second-floor office revising the script. What the difference of about 20 feet would make, I couldn’t tell, but I’d heard that offenders had been warned off before.
Another sign of strangeness occurred on my third or fourth day when I received an inter-office phone call from an assistant who said she couldn’t read my memo. I walked over to see what was wrong, only to realize that she, perhaps still stoned from the ’70s, was trying to read it upside down. The ranch was at once mellow and high-strung, an eccentric place. Although I was certainly an oddball, I didn’t know if I’d make it, and for the first few days and weeks woke up regularly at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat.

The Rise of Skywalker Ranch

After the phenomenal success of Star Wars in 1977, Lucas the Utopian had been born. Surprisingly to him, he suddenly had the means to realize his dreams and ideas. Having already tried with Coppola to create an artistic hub with American Zoetrope, Lucas could go all out and build the ultimate filmmaking think-tank, a place where he and his friends would be free and productive, far from Hollywood phoniness and urban distractions; a place where a film editor, cooped up and confined for hours in a dark room, could step out to hear the birds and feel the sunshine.
Through his company Parkway Properties, Lucas made his first major land purchase in 1978: the 1,700 acre Bull Tail Ranch (sometimes written as “Bulltail”), which had been owned by the Soares family. More acreage followed, and, by 1980, he and his wife, Marcia, had initiated an immense building and landscaping project under the auspices of the Skywalker Development Company, which had construction and interior design groups, an art glass studio, and a team of architects from two firms. During the big push, as many as 80 or so craftspeople lived onsite. The Lucases spared no expense, overseeing and planning everything down to doorknobs and window hinges. The story of the building of Skywalker Ranch could easily be the subject of its own book and probably will be one day.
Over the years the Lucases also bought several buildings around their Parkway House office in San Anselmo (they turned Parkway into their own home in 1979). Some of these new properties became rentals and some workplaces, such as the ones on Ancho Vista Avenue and Redwood Road. In September or October 1985, the ranch was finally ready, and Lucas moved Lucasfilm operations—marketing, publishing, licensing, legal, administrative, and his office staff—from those scattered sites into Skywalker. But he never, ever stopped making improvements.
During my own first few months at Skywalker, I saw land on the crest of a hill being prepared for hundreds of olive trees to be planted, while, inside the Main House, carpenters and masons tunneled vertically from the roof to the foundations, in order to install a chimney and a fireplace in the entryway. Those who’d been with the company longer often referred to Lucas as “Mr. Winchester,” after the rifle heiress, Sarah Winchester, who had kept craftspeople busy on her Victorian mansion for almost 40 years with constant changes and alterations.
Lucas’s goal had been to unite all of his moviemaking subsidiaries in one place, but Skywalker Ranch was zoned for only about 300 employees. The 1,000 or so members of ILM therefore stayed put in the industrial zone of San Rafael, about 25 minutes away, where they could also continue to make use of hazardous materials and explosives. The videogame branch, LucasArts, also kept its 350 or so people in a nondescript office building about 15 minutes east, next to the 101 freeway, for lack of space.
My first week, five other new hires and I were given an orientation tour. Our day started in the Breakfast Room of the Main House, the exterior wall of which was glass; its interior painted an airy pale blue. Surrounded by farm-like buffets and cabinets topped with wicker baskets, we sat at a long country-style wooden table facing Lucasfilm President Gordon Radley, who met with new hires as a kind of tradition. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a Peace Corps volunteer, he’d joined the company in 1985 as Deputy General Counsel. He had a round, light-red face, thinning hair, and spoke frankly, telling us that we were standing on the shoulders of those who came before us.
“You don’t really deserve this place,” he said.
We would have to earn our stripes.
One of Radley’s primary responsibilities at the time was overseeing construction of Big Rock Ranch, which was going up on the other side of the hill behind the Main House (Lucas had bought that adjoining 1,117-acre ranch in 1980). Behind schedule, Big Rock would be a sister complex, but with a different entrance on Lucas Valley Road, about five minutes east of Skywalker. A third project still farther east was even then in the planning stages, Grady Ranch (1,053 more acres, which Lucas had purchased back in 1985 and 1986, in two deals).
Once we finished eating and Radley had learned a little about each of us, a guide from HR took us through the interior of the 50,000-square-foot Main House, pointing out its ornate redwood moldings, much of the wood reclaimed. On the wall of the Art Nouveau living room, over the fireplace, was a Norman Rockwell painting of three workers caring for a young, injured woman; she lies on the ground, her head supported by a kindly man, a composition meant to invite comparisons with a religious moment, a kind of WPA Pietà.
The next room was dominated by piano, recovered from a girls’ school, which, our guide told us, composer John Williams played on occasion. Elsewhere was a stained-glass Stickley lamp and a Francisco Zuniga sculpture of a mother nursing her child.
On the Main House’s wraparound front porch were wicker armchairs that provided a breath-taking view of the inner, pleasant valley, a Shangri-La surrounded by rolling hills, brown in the summer, green in the winter. To the right and down the hill, was the Technical “Tech” Building, made from something like 360,000 reclaimed red bricks, tons of stone, and sandblasted wood, modeled on an 1880s-era winery (but also meant, I believe, to have looked like it was expanded later on).
“The most expensive building per square-foot west of the Mississippi,” our guide said. “Home of Skywalker Sound.”
The Tech Building faced Ewok Lake, where the more courageous employees sometimes swam. Behind the building was an underground factory, hidden from view, where immense machinery powered postproduction technology and climate controls. Inside, our group was ushered past sound studios with Art Deco colors, designs, and armchairs provided with the latest technology. In a spacious cafeteria, where cushioned chairs on wheels could roll easily on a polished stone floor, we were directed to a large illustrated poster of Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
“Any idea why that’s here?” our guide asked. “Because Bogart’s wide-brimmed hat inspired Indy’s.”
Beyond the cafeteria was a recording studio big enough to house a symphony. Upstairs was the reception area of Skywalker Sound where Academy Awards and other honors were behind glass: Oscars for Jurassic Park, Titanic, Forrest Gump, and others. The whole immaculate space was another adventure in Art Deco—Fred Astaire in tails and Ginger Rogers in her white feathered gown would not have looked out of place—which was in turn dominated by a poster of Jean-Luc Goddard’s 1965 film, Alphaville.
“Why is that one here?” our guide asked rhetorically. “Because Alphaville inspired THX 1138, George Lucas’s first feature-length film, and the patented sound system is called ‘THX.’”
Clearly, the posters were telling a story. Going back downstairs, we passed a truly enormous one—around eight by ten feet—for Sergei Eisenstein’s October, a fitting reminder of the Russian director and cinematic pioneer who championed the two dominant postproduction arts practiced in the Tech Building: film editing and sound design.
Our next stop was down a short flight of stairs to the 300-seat Stag Theater. I can’t adequately describe the mind-blowing beauty of this movie house, the brainchild of corporate technical director Tom Holman, who masterminded it using a “crossover” technology, which apparently combined different disciplines (indeed, he is the real reason for the “THX” moniker: his initials, “T” and “H,” plus “X” for “crossover”).
A veteran sound technician and “audio guru,” Holman had been lured to Lucasfilm by its promise in 1980. “Here was the first movie studio to be built from the ground up since the Thirties,” he told Mel Lambert in August 1996. “We had a music-scoring stage, mix-to-picture, sound, editorial—a typical full-function film post-production facility… I got the opportunity to examine the whole film-making process.”
Back in 1992, the Stag Theater had been used as the flagship THX demonstration center, referred to as “arguably the most acoustically perfect theater in the world.” Those who wanted to be certified to sell the Lucasfilm Home THX Audio System were treated to a day-long seminar (and then some), which included a talk given by Holman in which he explained how movie sound was done—Foley, afx, bfx, dialogue—and who then used the idol theft scene out of Raiders of the Lost Ark to show how sound was built up. (In 1992, a Home THX System ran about $10,000.)
The point of our visit was similar, to make plain the importance of sound design. They did this by showing us, several times, not Raiders, but the same 30 seconds from the D-Day landing in the more recent Saving Private Ryan (1998), for which Sky Sound had won two Academy Awards (Best Sound and Best Sound Effects Editing). First we saw the sequence, in which Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) and troops run onto the beach amidst incredible carnage, without any sound at all; then with only Hank’s breathing; then with only single gunshots and ricochets; next, artillery and rapid-fire machine guns; then shouting, groaning, and screaming (if I remember correctly). When the many tracks were finally played at once, at brain-shattering volume, the theater was filled with a multilayered audio harmony of machines, pain, and story.
We were convinced.
“Sound is 50 percent of the picture,” our guide said. “That’s the motto here.”
(The sound volume in Stag Theater was an ongoing struggle between management and the projectionists. The latter wanted their state-of-the-art audio system played as loud as human ears could stand—or louder—while others wanted a more reasonable level. After a preview of Finding Nemo there, a movie for kids!, my ears rang for days…)
Next was the Fire Department, which had its own Skywalker Ranch trucks; we saw the outside of what looked like a barn, but which was really the art, costume, and film archives (we didn’t go inside), and were shown the Inn Complex, massive stone and wood edifices, where guests could sleep over or have a long stay in one of the 26 suites (one-, two-, and three-bedrooms) named after Dorothy Parker, Ansel Adams, Frank Lloyd Wright (complete with a framed drawing by that genius), and others, or hang out in the living room or “miner’s lounge.”
Our group walked back up the hill, passing beneath a canopy of redwood trees, across a bridge over a creek, past the vineyards (you could buy Skywalker wine at the company store) to the four multi-storied brown-shingle houses behind the Main House, our offices, connected by foot paths, yet separated discretely by large native trees: the Carriage House (licensing and publishing; style, 1915 Barn), the Brook House (marketing and PR; style, 1913 Craftsman), the Stable House (once the home of Lucasfilm Games; human resources and training), and the Gate House (legal and finance; style, 1870 Victorian/Craftsman).
Over the years I’d come to the conclusion that Skywalker Ranch and its ancillary works were Lucas’s most grandiose project, his equivalent to Disney’s studio, Disneyland, or “Hearst Castle,” possibly his most beautiful, cherished composition, a multi-vista painting in four dimensions—and, while at its peak, the creative hub for hundreds, something he’d imagined for years and spent decades and a sizable fortune making a reality.
Into this thriving, bustling community, I arrived and somehow managed to keep my job for the first few weeks. Except for the orientation tour, there was no other training or explanations on how things were done. I was given a workload of about 15 books to edit—DK’s Visual Dictionary and Cross-Section books; the last of the Random House Star Wars kids books; Scholastic’s Boba Fett series; etc.—and expected to perform.

Life at Skywalker I: Lunch

(This is the first of several asides, in which make an attempt to describe life at Skywalker.)

Of the four places you could eat at the ranch, the “fanciest” was the Main House dining room. With about eight tables, it was almost a restaurant, with a staff of waiters and cooks. During cold weather, a fire crackled in a stone hearth. The kitchen was supplied with vegetables from the ranch’s organic garden (created by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame), and Kobe beef was served, at times, from the ranch’s Wagyu cattle, which grazed on the hillsides. There was a vegetarian option every day.
A year after my arrival, the restaurant became a buffet. Once, when it was crowded, George stood there with his tray looking for a table. After an awkward moment or two, during which he couldn’t decide if he should sit with others, and no one else could decide if they should invite him over, he exited the dining room and found a table elsewhere.
(Note: It was relaxed enough during those early years that if, say, the deserts weren’t all eaten, you could come by at around 3 p.m., and grab one for free; no one wanted to waste food. Mornings, anyone could go into the kitchen and use the cappuccino machine.)
Once a week during summers, the chef would fire up a big stone BBQ grill outside the Main House, where they’d cook ribs, corn, and beans, and the like, which you could eat at tables on the back porch.
Attached to the Main House via a covered walkway was the Solarium, which had a soup, salad, and sandwich bar. This was where those in a hurry could purchase a quick lunch and sit beneath a glass dome and leafy trees, whose trunks descended into the floor and earth below; there was also a small exterior balcony with a table and chairs that one had to share with persistent bees.
The Tech Building had its own cafeteria, the largest on the ranch, which featured a more southwest cuisine.
(If you carpooled more than 10 or 12 times a month, you received about 50 “LucasBucks”; 20 carpools meant more bucks. Because the cafeterias were already subsidized—you could eat for around $6—these bucks were enough to lunch several times a month for free.)
The Fitness Center was the most casual and perhaps the most popular spot, because it had a grill and served hamburgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, tuna melts, and daily specials, with French Fries. Here you’d fine those directors and producers who were staying at the Skywalker Ranch Inn, while doing postproduction work on their films at Sky Sound.

Next: Into the Maelstrom

See the whole interview with Tom Holman here: http://www.mediaandmarketing.com/13Writer/Interviews/MIX.Tom_Holman.html

TRaFoSW: Part 4

The Rise and Fall of Star Wars, Blog #4

6/28/2017
13 Comments

A Winding Road to Lucasfilm
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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.

TRaFoSW: Part 3

THE RISE AND FALL OF STAR WARS, BLOG #3

6/26/2017



A Kid at Universal Studios

My dad wrangled a developmental deal to produce Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, so they gave him and his partner Paul Aratow a bungalow at Universal Studios. On subsequent trips down south between the years 1975 and 1977, he brought me with him and I was able to wander around the lot on my own. The experience of being surrounded by actual movies and TV shows being filmed increased my knowledge about how they were actually made, the process. I completely fell in love with movies, which I’d already had a big crush on.
During one self-guided “tour,” I saw actor Raymond Burr, walking, which was a shock, for his character was always in a wheelchair on TV’s Ironside (only later did I realize he’d played the heavy in Hitchcock’s Rear Window). Outside a soundstage, I saw Robert Conrad from Wild, Wild West seated in the cockpit section of a WWII fighter plane in front of a painted cloud backing being rocked sideways and up and down by a crew for TV’s Black Sheep Squadron. On another day, my father snuck me onto a sound stage where I saw a cast of black and white actors in an unusually radical film called Car Wash written by Joel Schumacher (a friend of my father’s) and starring Richard Pryor, among many others.
My biggest thrill came on a sunny southern California day circa 1976. It must have been lunchtime or something, for I was able to saunter through huge sliding doors onto a soundstage where, lit half in the sun, half in shade, I saw the mechanical shark for Jaws. Either the original or a modified one. It was on two or three saw horses, probably being prepared for the Universal Studio Tour (during which it would eventually surge out of a lake to terrify visitors seated in two-car open trams). A crew or someone must have been working on the shark, because a large section of its synthetic skin had been taken off; the discarded segments, like irregular pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, were stored in a wooden crate on the ground. Consequently I could stare in wonder at the mechanical beast’s complex entrails—and that was mind-boggling. I was face-to-face with the monster that had completely terrified and traumatized me only a year before (see “The Jaws Blog” on this site for an interpretation of that film).
Little did I know that Lucas’s tiny production office for “The Star Wars” was across the street from Universal in a trailer parked on a lot, for he’d directed his previous film, American Graffiti, for that studio. In fact my father was friendly with Verna Fields, one of its editors, who’d also edited Jaws. I could have crossed the street and knocked on the door to Lucas’s trailer, and perhaps glimpsed Ralph McQuarrie’s paintings for the movie to come, because at that time no one knew about it and no one cared.
Oddly enough, a few months later, my father and his partner Paul drove Carrie Fisher from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, where she was singing and performing with her mother, Debbie Reynolds. “She was a real honey, a sweetheart,” Alan told me later. “No airs or pretensions, which was unusual for Hollywood, especially with her star power, but scandalous parents.”
When Lucas departed for England and Tunisia to shoot his film about a farm boy named Luke who leaves home and discovers the Force, I was stuck at Berkeley High School. High School wasn’t all bad, but like Luke Skywalker and a million other teenagers, I couldn’t wait to get out.
A year later, in 1977, I did not want to go see Star Wars. My mother and her live-in boyfriend of several years, Jerry Graham, had tickets to a preview showing at the Coronet Theater in San Francisco. Jerry was the manager of KSAN, a popular radio station, and often received free passes to events. One of his DJs, Terry McGovern would come over to the house and he was another connection. McGovern had played the high school principal in American Graffiti; even earlier, in a voice-over for THX 1138, McGovern had invented a word—“I think I ran over a Wookiee”—that Lucas had later used to describe a giant furry alien.
Jerry told Peter and I that Star Wars was a science-fiction movie, which was, for me, the wrong genre. Not too long before, I’d been obliged by my father to see Solaris, a Russian art-house sci-fi movie, and had sat there in mute incomprehension for what seemed a very, very long time.
But my brother and I went along to the Coronet. After the lights went down in the old movie palace, my brother has always claimed that Lucas stood up and was applauded. When the movie started—in mind-popping 70mm and the best sound system in the city—we were blown away. As it did for nearly all kids, Star Wars felt unique, unlike anything before or since. I loved it. However, I was a little bit too old to really dive into the whole thing as deep as those who were eight or nine or younger.
Peter was more into it than I was. He saw The Empire Strikes Back first and told me I had to go see it. I stood in line, saw it, and liked it. But by the time Return of the Jedi came out in 1983, I was going to New York University, living in the East Village, dating, going to hear The Ramones and Gang of Four, and thought that the Ewoks were beyond stupid.
Star Wars was over.

Next: Star Wars Wasn’t Over…

TRaFoSW: Part 2

THE RISE AND FALL OF STAR WARS, BLOG #2

Two Sides of the Bay

Circa 1974, while George Lucas was writing his rough draft of “The Star Wars” in San Anselmo, California, I was attending Martin Luther King Junior High School, across the bay in Berkeley, trying to survive a pretty tough place.
Although seemingly separated by the San Francisco Bay, an age gap, and circumstances, my circle of family and friends were closer to those of various filmmakers and Lucas than I knew. Given the crowded temporal spaceways of present, future, and past, those two worlds often overlapped as the decade went on, in a case of colliding individuals and interconnected free-wheeling destinies.
Our Berkeley neighbor on North Street, a steep dead-end block of shingle houses, was Ernest “Chick” Callenbach, a skinny, thoughtful man who wrote Ecotopia and was the long-time editor of Film Quarterly. George Lucas and other young directors, writers, editors, cinematographers, and movie nuts would stop by Chick’s house to hang out and talk about the latest films, new techniques and equipment, cameras, and the business during the early 1970s.
I doubt I crossed paths with them then, but Chick was often around, getting in and out of his Citroen DS, and I got to know him because his son, Hans, and I were part of a neighborhood gang of kids who played together. They also had a dachshund that ate bees. Film Quarterly, which Chick founded in 1958, helped galvanize Bay Area filmmakers, an eccentric community that wanted to be independent of the stagnant entertainment industry 500 miles to the south.
Published in 1975, Chick’s Ecotopia was a groundbreaking novel about a similar kind of thinking, where northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the United States to form a more civilized, more balanced society, ecologically, in terms of gender, and in its sexuality and politics. (Decades later, Chick gave me the videogame rights to Ecotopia and asked me to find a publisher, but I was unsuccessful in sparking interest.)
My father* had been lured to Berkeley by the founder of Rolling Stone magazine, Jann Wenner. So in 1970, we’d all moved from New York City to the West Coast where he became the magazine’s Associate Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the division Straight Arrow Books. My father, Alan, had edited and published Chick’s first book, Living Poor With Style, at Straight Arrow in 1972, but had rejected Ecotopia.
A short walk away from the Rolling Stone offices, at 746 Brannon, was American Zoetrope, at 827 Folsom, the fledgling independent film company co-founded by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. Workdays, my father would take the bus or drive into the city to work at Rolling Stone/Straight Arrow’s funky offices south of Mission. Often, he would take me with him, on school holidays, anytime I was sick, and many weekends. We never strolled over to Zoetrope, even for a peek, but a common denominator of the two groundbreaking enterprises was drugs.
Throughout these years, so many people, particularly in the arts, were on so many drugs, that, as a kid, I had an almost permanent contact high. I didn’t take drugs, didn’t smoke pot, wasn’t interested, but didn’t need to. When the so-called grown-ups around me were tripping on LSD in Tilden Park, I could see Godzilla coming over the yellow hills. Jann Wenner tried to put my five-year-old brother, Peter, in a refrigerator; joints were passed around at pool parties—and there’s another connection. A young Rolling Stone photographer named Annie Leibovitz often came to those laid-back shindigs, took a shot of my brother Peter he still treasures, and, decades later, having become world-renown, she would take exclusive photos of George Lucas and the cast of each Prequel Trilogy Star Wars film for Vanity Fair.
My parents divorced the year after we arrived in California, but they both stayed in Berkeley. Alan bought a house in the hills above the Claremont Resort Hotel, where one of his partners in drug-addled madness, writer Hunter S. Thompson, came to work with him. At that age, about 12, all I knew about Hunter Thompson was what I’d read about “Uncle Duke”—the crazy character modeled on Hunter in “Doonesbury,” Gary Trudeau’s comic strip. I read it every morning in the newspaper without fail. Uncle Duke was a narcotics-fueled fiend with a violent streak, and my experience with Hunter only confirmed that.
I remember splashing and swimming around in the water at the Claremont while Thompson sat chain-smoking by the hotel’s swanky pool in a bathing suit and cowboy boots, with bare, skinny torso and dark sunglasses, crouched over a round, white metal table littered with ashtrays and typed pages.
He and my dad were working on some book—they would collaborate on several, which is another story—but one day circa 1974 my father was supposed to drive Hunter to the airport. He took me along for the ride, probably because it was a weekend and I was staying with him.
We arrived at the Claremont early one morning, took the elevator up to the honeymoon suite just under the flagpole tower, and found Hunter’s room. My father knocked. No answer. He knocked again, louder. No answer. Then, because my father had no patience at all—we’re talking none—he pounded and kicked at the door, stretching its hinges and screaming at Hunter to open up. Moments later, Hunter appeared, scowling and unshaven, wearing a towel. Behind him I saw a half-naked woman in a messy bed. Hunter had completely forgotten about his flight.
As editor and babysitter, my father stormed in and began furiously throwing Hunter’s shirts, pants, and underwear into a suitcase.
We made it to the car—a long open convertible—and I sat in the back with Hunter as we tore down the highway across the Bay Bridge toward the San Francisco airport. I looked up at him and asked, “What would you do if you met Gary Trudeau?”
Hunter looked down at me. He had a long, haggard face, and, with a cigarette dangling from his lip (I swear), he drawled (Hunter was from Kentucky): “I’d rip his lungs out.”
A colorful and aptly phrased response, which I never forgot. Later I read a few of his books and it turned out Hunter Thompson wasn’t just some insane drug freak. He could write. I read a lot as a kid, but I never considered writing; in those days I liked to draw. “Writing” my comic books was secondary to drawing.
George Lucas didn’t take drugs and he began work on his third draft of “The Star Wars” in 1975, the year Jann Wenner fired my father (“for no good reason,” my dad told me, “but I’d lasted longer than any other Rolling Stoneexecutive”). I’d never liked Wenner, who was abrasive and, even in a kid’s eyes, manipulative. With the money from his severance deal, my father decided to become a film producer.

Next: A Kid at Universal Studios (don’t worry—will get to Lucasfilm next week)

Twitter: @jwrinzler

*See alanrinzler.com for a list of some of the classics my father edited. The Max Perkins of his generation? Alan worked with Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Toni Morrison, and Hunter, among many others, and published Manchild in the Promised Land, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and the photographs of Danny Lyon, among other projects. Today he’s a freelance editor.

TRaFoSW: Part 1

The Rise and fall of Star Wars, blog #1

6/21/2017
43 Comments

I came back from lunch to find that George Lucas had sold his company.
An email addressed to “LUCAS-USA," myself included, read, “I wanted to let you know that today Bob Iger and I have signed an agreement for The Walt Disney Company to acquire Lucasfilm. I wanted to be there to tell you in person, however Disney asked that I be at a press event with Bob in L.A. this afternoon. As soon as it is over I will be boarding a plane so that Kathy and I can meet with you for a more in-depth discussion…. George.”
His sale of Lucasfilm to Disney included the intellectual copyrights to Star Wars and Indiana Jones. A follow-up email from a staffer explained where to find the shuttle buses that were waiting to take those without cars from our San Francisco offices to Point Richmond, where a large, empty warehouse big enough for the whole company to congregate in had been reserved. It was a sunny Tuesday. October 30, 2012.
In the hallways and passageways between offices and cubicles, people skittered about, shouting out who was going with whom, and what it all might mean. I piled into a friend’s car with others, and we were among the first to arrive on the windswept headland by the bay, not far from where Pixar Animation used to be housed. In fact, Bay Area filmmaking was all around us: Tippett Studio was about 20 miles to the south, as was producer Saul Zaentz’s company Fantasy Film; Pixar had moved to Emeryville, another few exits down Highway 80, while Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope was back in San Francisco. Lucas had championed this filmmaking community, often referred to as “Hollywood North” (a misnomer), throughout his career—even bankrolling a book and documentary about it, Cinema by the Bay (which is another story)—but now, we, his former employees, were potentially to be moved south. As I entered the warehouse, I couldn’t help imagining a forced march to Burbank, to Hollywood.
Readers of this blog may know that I’d worked closely with George Lucas on many book projects, while studying and writing about the history of Lucasfilm for over a decade, but they won’t know that I’d always thought that Lucas would sell his company to Disney. I’d pegged the date to around 2022, however, so I was as surprised as anyone by his sudden move. I’d also thought Sony might be a contender. The Japanese were and are crazy about Star Wars. But when I spoke to George a few weeks later, he told me that Sony didn’t have deep enough pockets. He’d considered Comcast briefly. He’d taken a look at a few of the Internet giants, too. But Disney had always been the frontrunner.
I’d figured George had to sell—his three adult kids weren’t interested, it seemed—and Disney was his best bet to keep his characters and franchise alive. Disney and its chairman Bob Iger were also hell-bent on the acquisition of intellectual properties, having gobbled up Winnie-the-Pooh and The Muppets, Marvel and Pixar. Besides, Lucas had been in business with “The Mouse” since the first Star Tours ride opened in Disneyland several decades before. You didn’t have to be smart to know a sale was in the cards.
But it was too soon for many. The atmosphere in the lofty space, as more of the two-thousand-plus employees swarmed through the doors, was a mixture of sadness for the past and anxiety for the future. Though no one at Lucasfilm restrained from criticism of Lucasfilm, ever—indeed, it was a way of life for some people—George was liked and admired by most. He’d created various waking dreams, solace and inspiration to millions, first in American Graffiti, then Star Wars, then Indiana Jones. The spinoff toys, books, comic books, and videogames—but mostly the toys—had been a big part of childhood’s fabric for many people in the U.S. and abroad. Quite a few of those strolling in to find a good spot from which to view the elevated stage had grown up with those plastic X-wings, Millennium Falcons, and action figures.
Although there were plenty of non-fans at Lucasfilm, hundreds of people had chosen to come, as artists, technicians, craftspeople, or support staff, to the safe-haven of the creative companies Lucas had founded: visual effects powerhouse Industrial Light & Magic, state-of-the-art postproduction facility Skywalker Sound, or pioneering videogame maker LucasArts. Taking their seats around me in plastic folding chairs were newbies and those who’d been with George from the beginning, such as tall, wispy haired ILM legend Dennis Muren and even taller Paul Huston, another multitalented visual effects veteran. Over the past few years, I’d been lucky enough to get to know them both.
Others had started in one of Lucas’s various San Anselmo offices in the late 1970s, at Skywalker in the late 1980s or at Big Rock Ranch and his latest campus on the Presidio in the aughts. Not many of them had much if any contact with George, but he was still their boss, their distant and quirky leader. I’d been fortunate enough to get to know him, too, and this was going to be his goodbye.
How did he get to this point? How did we end up in those seats to ask him questions about the future of Lucasfilm?
The rest of this blog The Rise and Fall of Star Wars will answer those questions and more. If that interests you, then read on… (Friday. I’m going to try and post new material Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays).

Please note: This blog is about my time at Lucasfilm, from October 1, 2001, to December 31, 2015. As such, though I’ll try to be objective, my observations are no doubt my subjective views of these years, not any clinical “truth.”

Next: Two Sides of the Bay, the 1970s.

Why 4K in the home is dumb, according to cinematographer Steve Yedlin...

Stu Maschwitz, of ProLost fame, long ago wrote a very informative blog post about why having 4K resolution screens in your home is stupid. The full blog post is available here: https://prolost.com/blog/2013/1/22/4k-in-the-home.html?rq=4k%20in%20the%20home

Recently, I have been communicating with cinematographer Steve Yedlin (DP for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Looper, Brick, etc...) on Twitter about all things camera related. Steve is known in the industry as being very technical-minded, and has conducted numerous technical camera/post tests. His latest tests deals with resolution, from IMAX down to Arri Alexa, which I think you could benefit from watching. That presentation can be found here: http://yedlin.net/ResDemo/

Anyway, I was thinking more about spatial resolution, and as I was researching the topic, I found an article that Mr. Yedlin authored on the very topic. I have pasted some of the text here, but the rest of his article can be found here: http://www.yedlin.net/BigK_2014.html

"A recent NY Times article (http://ow.ly/Ct58Y) troubled me when it stated with brazen confidence that “There is no doubt that with the right video playing, 4k simply looks better than an HD TV.”  Even in a top newspaper known for journalistic rigor (not just a tech review site), marketing deception has been given preference over rigorous science.

The truth is that given a fair comparison with controlled variables, 4k resolution is nearly indistinguishable (or perhaps completely indistinguishable) from HD TV resolution in normal viewing conditions, and the TV manufacturers are in large part selling snake oil to consumers.

The unchallenged fact of image science is that when you’re watching TV in a real-world situation (meaning, say, ten feet away on your couch, not 6 inches away with a magnifying glass) there’s a ceiling to the amount of resolution the human eye can perceive.  That ceiling was surpassed when we moved from SD to HD.  When you move beyond that ceiling, increased resolution does not translate into better perceived quality or more sharpness. (For tech details on this, start here: http://ow.ly/CBZme).

A fair and controlled comparison between HD and 4k shows almost no difference for normal TV viewing conditions, and in fact “4k” content often comes from 2k source footage, and almost always has artificial sharpening added to it in mastering — that’s fake sharpening that is (technically speaking) a degradation, but adds perceptual sharpness. The sharpening would look the same if applied to an HD image instead of a 4k image.  

Why would 4k content distributers REDUCE quality on the very format that they're advertising has  more quality!? It's because they know that their claims are incompatible with reality: that true 4k resolution doesn’t actually look appreciably different to a viewer than HD resolution. So marketing demands that something has to be done to alter the image and make a striking visual difference to sell the gimmick, even if the procedure undermines the very claim being proffered: increased resolution or "quality."

So, going to the electronics store and comparing HD and 4k TVs is not an even handed test, because 4k-mastered content and 4k-upscaling have gimmicks built in to create a fake wow-factor that is neither real resolving power nor is it the image that the author (director, cinematographer, etc) intended. I know from first hand experience that this is the case with 4k mastered content, and I would speculate (but don’t know for certain) that it’s also the case with the TV’s themselves: that they add sharpening and other fakery when upscaling HD images to 4k, or perhaps even when just displaying 4k images.

I know this is a nerdy thing to write a long post about, but it’s frustrating to see TV manufacturers duping consumers into "upgrading" their technology by putting a bigger number in front of the letter K and representing it as the “quality” of an image, when in fact the only practical difference from HD in many or all cases is that it's been degraded with artificial edge contrast (which, if applied to an HD image, would make it look just as “sharp” as their 4k content.)

High pixel-density screens are useful for computer monitors and smart phones, because those are screens that you view at a very close distance and concentrate on only a small detail of the screen: you read fine text, or you look at a photo embedded in a webpage, etc. But high pixel-density screens don't have practical application as big screen TVs that are livingroom centerpieces, especially while there are other (actually visible!) attributes of contemporary home theaters that could stand to be improved, including compression artifacts which are much much larger than single pixels (though that's a topic for a different time).

I hope this information can contribute to a more fair and balanced analyses in the media and that the public dialog will question artificially simplistic representations of technical data by manufacturers. "

On Working with Stanley Kubrick - Paths of Glory

I am a frequent reader of Cinephilia & Beyond, an in-depth blog about film history. It's a very good read, and I would suggest supporting the site as well.

Anyway, I made my weekly stop into the site a few weeks ago and read a wonderful article about the making of Stanley Kubrick's 1957 film 'Paths of Glory'. 'Paths of Glory' is an intimate look at the cost of war: on the grunts in the trench (WWI was mostly trench warfare) as well as those in the chateaus away from the front lines (ie: the generals who were calling the shots).

At the end of the article, there's an interview with the producer and long-time Kubrick collaborator, Jared B. Harris. It's a fascinating insight into the mind of Kubrick, and I'll put some of his questions and answers below.
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“You’ll never know complete satisfaction until you’ve tried your hand at directing,” Stanley Kubrick told his close friend and producer James B. Harris one day, late in 1962. The pair had been creative partners for nearly a decade—working together on a string of critically successful pictures: The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957) and Lolita (1962). After Lolita gave them both a welcome financial independence, they collaborated on a nuclear war-themed thriller called Edge of Doom, only to find they were at an amiable deadlock over the tone of the picture. Harris was committed to straightforward suspense; Kubrick wanted to turn it into an absurdist comedy. (It was later made as Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.) “I’m about to become the worst kind of producer,” Harris warned him, “I’m about to try and tell you how to direct your picture.” Kubrick replied: “You should direct.” On that note they dissolved their partnership but remained friends for life, until Kubrick’s death in 1999. And Harris went on to direct five features including The Bedford Incident (1965) and Some Call It Loving (1973). In a sense, Harris taught Kubrick how to produce, and Kubrick taught Harris how to direct. Artifacts, letters, scripts, photographs from their partnership, are currently on view as part of the Stanley Kubrick exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In a conversation with the Quarterly, Harris shares a rare view of Kubrick’s working method.

Can you describe a typical day—if there was such a thing as a typical day—shooting Paths of Glory?
The battlefield scenes were the last things on the schedule. That farmland we hired had to be dressed and built into a battlefield, with the trenches and barbwires and all of the shell holes. Stanley loved moving shots. The main thing was taking Kirk Douglas through this obstacle course, this barrage. The idea was that Kirk was going to be followed, in a moving shot, through as much action as we could muster before a cut had to be made, after which we would set up to continue. It was cold; it was uncomfortable; it was wet. Everything was tough on Kirk. After he did it the first time, he told Stanley, ‘I’ll give you one more, maybe two, but that’s it. I’m not going to do this forever.’ I remember Stanley asked me to go up on one of the big parallels, to check out an angle.

A parallel meaning a crane?
No. A parallel being a platform we built. Stanley didn’t like heights. I climbed up to look through the camera, and saw the image we were going to get. We had multiple cameras, even a handheld in the middle of the field, to cover the explosions, while Stanley covered Kirk with the moving shots. I don’t remember Stanley ever coming in with homework, saying, ‘This is the first shot we’re going to do.’ He pretty much knew in his guts, and then did it. Then again, there’s no room in a scene like that for added ideas. It’s a done deal: show Kirk going through the battle. Make it look as uncomfortable and dangerous as it can possibly look, with explosions all around him. Kirk had to crawl through the cold water and muddy shell holes.

You worked side by side every day with Kubrick for close to ten years. What was that like day-to-day?
I was required by Stanley to be there, not just as a producer, but because he liked input. There was no insecurity about him. Some people who are insecure don’t want other people hanging around, because they don’t want them to see, or witness any indecision on their part, or anything that could indicate they’re not sure of what they’re doing. Openness to suggestion was one of Stanley’s great attributes. He genuinely thought any idea that was better than his was going to make the picture better.

How did Kubrick deal with conflicts on the set? Did he raise his voice?
No. Stanley would never—not ever in the three pictures we did together—lose his temper. I don’t know if that changed after we went our separate ways. When we were together he was always able to outlast the other side of the argument, whether with actors, or in the case of Lucien Ballard on The Killing, the DP. On the first day of principal photography, Ballard, by then very established and sought after, decided to lay a set of tracks and choose a lens contrary to what had been asked for. When Stanley discovered this, he repeated his first order. Ballard objected, ‘It’ll be fine like this. Nobody will notice.’ Stanley looked him in the eye and said quietly, ‘You will either do as I direct or you can leave right now.’ Ballard nodded, rebuilt the tracks and they never had another bad moment. Stanley would say to me, ‘You need to write things down.’ He always had a notebook with him. He’d talk to somebody on the crew, ask them about the progress of this or that, and then jot a note. Later we’d be walking down the hall, and if this person were coming at us the other way, Stanley would already be patting his pocket, ready to follow-up. That was a moment of panic for a few people. You could see it in their eyes when they had no answer. We shot The Killing in 24 days; Paths of Glory in 66 days. We were getting up there, but disciplined. If I had to say to him, ‘We’re two days behind schedule,’ he’d smile and say: ‘Oh yeah? Watch this,’ and wham! We’d be back on.

How would he do that?
He was fast on his feet, and would think through a way to cover whatever was next—either simply, or in a single complex master.

What was the hardest part about directing for Kubrick?
Stanley would always say it was ‘the moment you arrive on the set each morning.’ It’s that way for every director. It was no different for Kubrick. You’ve got a city block filled with equipment, trucks, extras in costume, honeywagons. There you are pulling up, and dozens if not hundreds of people are looking straight at you. They’ve all got questions, and they need them answered right away. Everybody likes the idea of being a director—of being that guy that everybody looks to—but the reality is a whole other ballgame. You’ve got to be ready to answer, but you’ve got to keep your nerve and not answer too fast. They talk now about how Kubrick disciplined himself with chess. It’s true. You’re staring at the board and you think, ‘I can grab that guy’s queen,’ but if you don’t catch your breath and rethink, you could be building a trap for yourself. The same with filmmaking: You don’t want to be too attracted to an easy answer. An idea might look great on the surface, but create a world of problems up the line. And that applies if you’re in a bad spot. If some disaster happens, and everything’s capsized—keep your nerve. Don’t jump at the first easy answer. Look at your options. They’re there.

Kubrick clearly knew what he wanted to do. Would he listen to other opinions?
Stanley had a very open mind. He encouraged contributions by other people. A number of suggestions I made, he accepted, but if he didn’t like them, you weren’t criticized. He admired you; he admired anybody who thought enough about something to have an idea, with the intention of making it better. He’d say, ‘Look. The director’s going to get credit for everything in the picture, no matter where the idea comes from. If a lighting guy on the catwalk yells down, ‘Why don’t you try it from this angle,’ and that suggestion is better than the idea you had, you’re going to get the credit for it anyway. Why not accept it?’ [laughs] If an idea makes a picture better, pride of authorship is a waste of time and effort. Kubrick invited enormous input from me on Lolita. My brother, Bob, composed the ‘Love Theme,’ which Stanley loved. I picked Nelson Riddle to do the score. The first day we came to record the theme, we discovered that Nelson had written it in a minor key. As soon as he started to play it, I jumped out of my seat. ‘We can’t do this in a minor key. A minor key works if you’re doing horror, or suspense, but we don’t want that. The main love theme should be beautiful.’ Stanley welcomed that adjustment. He appreciated that I could discern a difference, and let me run with what I could contribute to the film. So, overnight it was transposed into a major key, and became something else entirely.

After you parted ways and began directing for yourself, did he give you advice?
He not only gave me advice, he wrote down things for me like I was a kid he was sending to school. ‘Don’t get bullied into making a shot-list’ was key advice. He said, ‘A lot of magic happens on the set; it’s no disgrace to not know what you want to do.” It’s no disgrace. If you’re not careful, people will bully you into thinking there’s something wrong with you if you don’t have a clear image of where every shot is, and where you’re going to put the camera. Stanley said, ‘It’s much better to discover your strategy with dialogue scenes. You want the actors to make a contribution. Don’t put them in a position where they’re told what to do—that you’ve already set up the first shot in your mind. They may feel more comfortable walking around, doing this or that.’ He often said: ‘Let the camera accommodate the actors. Don’t have the actors accommodate the camera.

What did you learn about casting from Kubrick?
He always drilled into my head that you live or die by your choice of actors. They can be brilliant and bring to your film a dimension beyond your highest expectations. But they can also be incompetent, irresponsible, subject to moods, insecure, and the bearer of unlimited personal problems, which can easily affect the rest of the cast and turn the best-intended film into a shamble. He would say, ‘Unless you’re fortunate enough to have the financial wherewithal to replace a bad actor, you’re stuck with them for the rest of the schedule.’

If you’re working with a well-chosen actor but something is wrong anyway, what did he advise?
He told me there are three things you should carefully analyze, if your instincts tell you a scene doesn’t play. The first is: Do the actors know their lines? It could be that simple. If they don’t and have to be constantly prompted by the script supervisor, then there’s no rhythm to what you’re shooting. The mess is right there on the surface. On the other hand, if they do know their lines, ask yourself: Do they know what the scene is about? If they do and it still won’t play, then the scene itself isn’t written properly. The essential talent of a director is that ability to know when a scene is off, for whatever reason.

You and Kubrick shared a passion for music, particularly jazz. Is that what a director’s ear for the ‘false note’ boils down to?
As a director, you’re always dealing with a melodic line. Jazz deals with variations of a theme. All the films that Stanley directed, all the ones I directed, have been based on previously published material. That novel or story is the melody. In movies, as in jazz, the melody is stated. The harmonics that go with it remain the same—but the soloist, or the instrumentalist, or even the full orchestra will do variations on these harmonics, making up their own melody, so to speak. If an actor doesn’t know their lines, it’s as if they haven’t run their scales. They can’t play the tune, so they can’t improvise. They can’t go find the spontaneous thing inside the harmonics; it’s not going to swing. You can’t make anything new out of it.

Jazz also relies on improvisation. How did he feel about that?
The movies Stanley and I made relied on improvisations—but we didn’t want them to sound improvised. This is why rehearsal is so important. We’d have the actors try wild, extemporaneous stuff before shooting, but we’d record them. The discoveries would be woven into the script. You have all the spontaneity of improv, but it’s clean. You don’t have a million ‘y’knows,’ and ‘likes’ all over the place. When the actors were handed those pages and came in knowing their lines, the result was magic.

So ultimately, what did you take away from your time with Kubrick?
I did not have dreams of directing when I first met Stanley. My directing was totally impressed and influenced by his directing. When you see terrific athletes perform, when you see a Joe DiMaggio—he makes an impossible thing look easy. You don’t realize the degree of difficulty that exists when a master performs. [When I became a director] I was rudely awakened. You’re working with human beings. You have to be a combination of psychiatrist, Dutch uncle, genius, and leader. You can’t show weakness. You’ve got to supervise everybody, and answer all the questions from every department. It seemed so easy for Stanley.

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Be sure to check out the rest of the fantastic article here.

The Grand Tour Season 1 Review

Let me preface this by stating that I have an undying love for Top Gear (2002-2015). I am SO pleased that seasons 2-17 have appeared here on Amazon, as that is where I have gravitated towards after the viewing (putting up with) half of the first season of the train wreck (car wreck?) that is The Grand Tour.

I love the chemistry between Jeremy, Richard, and James. I love the creative cinematography and the beautiful sound design of the car testing segments of this show. It just seems to fall apart whenever we cut back to the tent and the boys (Jezza) have to see who's penis is bigger. Seriously?! This crap would have never made it onto the BBC (thank you, Censors), and I'm appalled at the trash that makes it onto this show. Granted, this is not broadcast TV where they have to adhere to strict content and ratings guidelines, but honestly, I believe that those constraints made the Boys more creative, and certainly more funny. Yes, the innuendos were still there on the BBC, they just had to be more creative in the way that it was executed. On The Grand Tour, it's blatant. It's in your face. The show is self-indulgent to the point where all it's worthwhile substance has been lost.

The American driver is a waste of everybody's time. Drop him for Season 2 and buy The Stig from the BBC. You know you want to. Take a pay-cut if you have to make it happen (looking at you, Jezza, Mr. Wilman). The "celebrity brain crash" segment was old in the first episode. We get it already. And no, James, that means they're not coming on the show.

I wanted SO badly to be able to enjoy this show with my family like I used to enjoy Top Gear, but I'm embarrassed to even watch it with my wife. Get your act together and grow up.

Your loyal fans (of which I was one) deserve better.