Lucas wasn’t ready to hand the keys to the Star Wars universe over to the games division just yet; games would have to be stand-alone, without any references to either Star Wars or Indiana Jones—but apart from telling the team what they couldn’t do, Lucas left his programmers alone. Taking the lessons the computer division had learned from creating the Genesis Effect for Star Trek II, Langston and his team figured out how to create fractal technology—in which images become clearer and more detailed as the player moves closer to an object—for less powerful home computers like the eight-bit Atari 800, a task many programmers had considered impossible. Lucasfilm programmers poured their efforts into two games: a futuristic basketball-soccer hybrid called Ballblazer, and a science fiction search-and-rescue game called Rescue on Fractalus!, in which the player maneuvered a star fighter through an alien landscape to rescue downed pilots. (The working title had been Rebel Rescue, a connection to the Star Wars universe Langston and his team couldn’t resist.)
Lucas played a few of the early demos, and even in video games, his sense for what an audience might experience was as keen as ever. After piloting his ship around the landscape in an early version of Fractalus, Lucas grew impatient simply flying around, landing, and picking up pilots, and asked why there was nothing to shoot at. When told the game had been designed without the use of the FIRE button, Lucas looked up quizzically. “Was that a game design,” he asked, “or a moral choice?” The design team shifted nervously. Lucas nodded. “Principle, uh huh,” he said. “It’s not going to work.”15 A FIRE button was added, as were on-screen antiaircraft cannons for the player to destroy.
Unfortunately, while the games division had broken new ground with its first two games, the Atari company was sinking fast, largely because of a $25 million investment in the rights to E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, then hastily assembling a terrible game that no one bought. There were endless delays and discussions—Lucas even jumped into the fray at one point to negotiate the logo—until Lucasfilm finally cut its relations with Atari (but kept its million dollars) and reached a deal with the upstart Epyx company, which put the two games on shelves in 1986. Both sold well enough, and Lucas was willing to continue bankrolling the division, permitting it to become an independent business entity within Lucasfilm, while keeping his hands largely off it. The only real direction he would give Langston and his team was an oft-repeated mantra: “Stay small. Be the best. Don’t lose any money.” Hal Barwood, a longtime friend and later a project leader in the games division, compared Lucas’s involvement to that of a rich uncle: “He paid the tuition fees to get you through college, but never knew what your major was.”16
Lucas would be a bit more invested in another Lucasfilm start-up, this one spun out of Sprocket Systems, where soundman Tom Holman had been hard at work designing a new auditorium at Sprocket’s C Building. Kazanjian remarked that the new theater had “the best sound system in the world.”17 That was because Holman, after taking into account the acoustics in the room, the placement of the speakers, the ambient noise in the theater, and plenty of other small details, had developed a precise set of specifications that provided the audience with an immersive, chest-rattling sound experience. Holman referred to it as simply a crossover network, in which the treble and the bass were divided electronically, rather than just being split into two different speakers, and the configuration soon came to be called the “Tom Holman Crossover.” Others called it the “Tom Holman Experiment”—but either way, it was eventually referred to as the THX sound system, a serendipitous nod to Lucas’s feature THX 1138.
Temple of Doom was being mixed at Sprocket specifically so it would sound great in a theater with the THX system; but the problem was, once the movie went into theaters with a sound system that wasn’t configured to Holman’s specifications, it was going to sound terrible. At the urging of Sprocket’s manager Jim Kessler, “we came to the conclusion [that it would be] great if we could get theaters that the public goes to… to sound this good,” said Lucas. “Because then what we hear here [in the sound editing room] is the same thing they would hear there [in the theater]. And that really started the whole THX program.”18 For Lucas, this was a big deal. He took seriously the way his movies sounded—having Ben Burtt’s sounds and John Williams’s music already made his films sound like no one else’s—and he resented having his movies sound great in the editing room, then terrible once they were inside a theater. “Sound is half the experience in seeing a film,” Lucas explained later—an obvious, if underappreciated, point, particularly to audiences who looked for the Dolby logo as an indication of a movie’s sound quality.19 But Dolby stereo alone couldn’t ensure that a movie would sound great once it left the sound editing room; THX had more to do with the theater in which a film was shown—a part of the movie experience Lucas couldn’t control. Until now.
Unlike most sound systems, THX didn’t—and still doesn’t—require theaters to purchase any particular set of equipment or speakers. It does, however, involve a theater’s reconfiguring its speaker arrangement, altering acoustics, and in some cases even changing the film’s illumination to meet very precise specifications. On March 1, 1983, Lucasfilm issued to theaters notice of its “Theater Alignment Program” (TAP), providing specifications that theaters could adapt to make movies sound as good as they possibly could. Nearly a hundred theaters participated in the program, leasing new equipment from Lucasfilm and paying to have their theaters reconfigured or retrofitted to reflect THX’s acoustical requirements. “THX became a kind of quality control process for the… exhibition of the film,” Lucas said proudly.20
In the coming decades, more than four thousand theaters around the world would undergo Lucas’s quality control process on their way to becoming “THX Certified Cinemas”; audiences, too, would come to recognize the metallic THX logo shown just before a film—accompanied by its “deep note,” which slowly builds in volume as it swirls through the sound system and eventually makes the entire theater rumble—as the definitive mark of great movie sound. Lucas had controlled the way his movies were filmed, edited, financed, and merchandised. Now he would control the way they sounded in the theaters as well—and get paid to do it, no less.
And then there was Pixar. Lucas still wasn’t sure what to do with Ed Catmull and his team in the graphics group within the computer division, who were still more interested in making movies with their Pixar computer than they were in building the digital editing system Lucas had asked them for. “I think Ed’s greatest fear was that at some point somebody higher up—George in particular—was going to say, ‘Wait a minute, the stuff you were supposed to build, you haven’t built,’” said Bob Doris, one of Catmull’s co-directors. “And it was becoming pretty clear that this was a problem.”21 Still, Catmull and his team were working; in addition to the Pixar Image Computer, they would have a digital picture editor they called EditDroid, as well as a digital sound editor called SoundDroid, ready to show by 1984. But Catmull’s heart wasn’t in it; instead, he and John Lasseter were planning an animated short they intended to unveil at the 1984 SIGGRAPH conference, an annual gathering of scientists, engineers, and devotees of computer graphics. That was when they’d show Lucas what they really could do. Lucas would be impressed. Catmull was sure of it.
For now, however, Lucas was much more interested in raising two-year-old Amanda, and in “fun and sun and skiing and boogeying and reading and pleasure writing.”22 He was even taking dance and guitar lessons, and racing cars again—a hobby he’d given up shortly after the birth of Amanda. He was trying to learn to loosen up—one of Marcia’s main complaints about him was that he was too tightly wound—and in December 1983, he would even start dating again, after being introduced to singer Linda Ronstadt backstage at one of her four concerts at Concord Pavilion that October.23
On the face of it, it was an odd pairing; Lucas was quiet and introspective and—another gripe of Marcia’s—not terribly adventurous in bed. Ronstadt, by contrast, was a heartbreaker and
a man-eater, known for high-profile romances with celebrities like musician J. D. Souther, journalist Pete Hamill, and California governor Jerry Brown. And yet she also clearly had a penchant for creative types—she’d briefly dated Steve Martin and had just ended a relationship with Jim Carrey—and liked that Lucas was so protective of their privacy, being careful to ensure they were never photographed together. Lucas was so low-key, in fact, that as he trailed along after Ronstadt in a San Anselmo drugstore, the proprietor thought he was her houseboy. “George is lucky to be with her,” said one friend. “He will have more fun than he’s ever had in his life. Then she will break his heart into thousands of pieces and go on to someone else.”24 Lucas would defy the odds; he and Ronstadt would date for five years. Neither would ever discuss the details of their relationship publicly.
Besides, reporters were much more interested in asking Lucas about the future of Star Wars. Would there be more movies? In 1983 Lucas would say only that he was reading books on mythology and scrawling vague notes with themes and ideas for the next two trilogies. The first trilogy, he explained, would be melodramatic, showing the politics that put the Empire in place. The final three, he continued, would be all about “moral choices, and the wisdom needed to distinguish right from wrong.”25 More than that, however, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say.
For staff at Skywalker Ranch, Lucas’s so-called retirement meant he was more involved in the day-to-day operations than ever before. He no longer needed the weekly updates from CEO Robert Greber, or Sprocket manager Jim Kessler; instead, he would simply show up at ILM to watch the effects team at work, or sit behind Ben Burtt as he edited sound effects for Temple of Doom, making employees feel as if the school principal were sitting in their classroom. For Greber, it was clear there were now one too many CEOs inside the organization. Lucas agreed. “The only problem,” Greber said later, “was that we agreed [the CEO] should be him, and not me.”26 Lucas became simply the boss—without a formal title, but clearly in control. Greber, meanwhile, slid over to a seat on the four-member board of directors—a board that could meet and advise but remained accountable to the company’s lone shareholder: George Lucas. For Lucas, Lucasfilm was a family business, just like his father’s stationery store. Family businesses didn’t need stockholders.
Family businesses probably didn’t have as much land as Lucas had, either. As construction on the ranch continued—the enormous Victorian-style Main House was nearly complete, and work was under way on the gigantic Tech Building, which would house the post-production facilities—Lucas continued to quietly purchase land adjacent to the ranch, scooping up the Grady Ranch and Big Rock Ranch on Lucas Valley Road. He envisioned using part of the acquired land for the second phase of the ranch, where he would build a new headquarters for ILM and the rest of the digital production facilities,27 most of which were currently working several miles away at the Kerner building and a collection of surrounding warehouses. But Lucas played the politics of the situation poorly, once again carrying out the purchase of the properties in the name of his accountant—and once again, area residents accused Lucas of having something to hide, this time berating Marin County planners for permitting him to establish “an industrial beachhead.” Lucas, his hackles up, pointed out that he was going to leave most of the land undeveloped and argued that having Lucasfilm own and develop the property kept out more undesirable developers. Neighbors were having none of it and sarcastically suggested that Marin County planners would next be issuing zoning exemptions for Union Carbide.28 Lucas could only roll his eyes. The argument would roil for nearly a decade. Meanwhile, ILM would remain stranded at Kerner.
The spring of 1984 brought Lucas another controversy of his own making, this time involving Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. After submitting the movie to the Motion Picture Association of America, which would determine the film’s rating, Lucas was informed that because of the film’s graphic violence, the MPAA was leaning toward assigning the film an R rating—a disaster for a franchise that was trying to appeal to all ages. “[Temple of Doom] was too gross to be PG,” admitted Lucas, but “it wasn’t quite gross enough to be an R.”29 Lucas and Spielberg’s intentionally disturbing film would nevertheless have a far-reaching effect on movie ratings. While the MPAA eventually relented and approved the more desirable PG rating for Temple of Doom, shortly thereafter the MPAA created the PG-13 rating, meaning parents were “strongly cautioned” that some material could be inappropriate for children under age thirteen.
Even as the May 23 release date for Temple of Doom approached, some newspaper ads still cautioned parents that the film might be “too intense” for children. The warning did nothing to scare parents or their children away; on its opening day, Temple of Doom set a one-day record by taking in more than $9 million—“‘JONES’ BUILDS A TEMPLE OF GOLD,” screamed the front page of Variety. By the end of its international run, it would take in $333 million. And all from Lucas’s budget of a little under $29 million.
While audiences made it the biggest movie of 1984, reviews for Temple of Doom ran from merely unimpressed to hugely disappointed. “Dark” was the word reviewers used most often to describe it, though the Washington Post critic pulled out all the stops in calling it “mean spirited and corrupt at its core.”30 Lucas admitted that “we went darker than any of us really wanted to go” but thought he and Spielberg should be given credit for “mak[ing] a different movie from Raiders. We didn’t want to just do the same movie over again.”31 Looking back on the film nearly thirty years later, Lucas was still favorably disposed toward it, even as it seemed to sum up on-screen both his and Spielberg’s own personal winters of discontent. “I like Temple of Doom,” Lucas insisted, “[but] is it fun to think back about that stuff emotionally for us?” He shook his head sadly and slowly answered, “Nooooo.”32
Each year, at a Fourth of July bash held at Skywalker Ranch, Lucas would give away what he called the Lucasfilm Yearbook, outlining the accomplishments of Lucasfilm and each division over the past year, complete with yearbook-style photos and brief bios of every staff member. In 1984, among photos of Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker, the yearbook noted that the Pixar computer would soon be moved over to ILM for use in special effects. But ILM didn’t want it—and despite the fact that the computer division was right next door to ILM in the Kerner building, ILM wasn’t all that interested in working with Ed Catmull and his graphics group either. “We got treated as a sideshow,” said computer animator Tom Porter. “Not disrespected, but certainly not embraced.”33
Since creating the Genesis Effect for Star Trek II, Catmull and his graphics team had used their computers only one other time, providing the briefing sequence in Return of the Jedi in which a computerized image of a force field projects out from Endor to surround the Death Star—hardly the earth-shattering stuff Catmull knew they were capable of. “The effect wasn’t so groundbreaking as the tools used to do it,” said programmer Tom Duff. ILM wasn’t all that impressed by it—and neither was Lucas. “We kept waiting for George to come around and ask us to be in the movies,” said Alvy Ray Smith, “but he never came.”34
For months, Catmull and Bob Doris had been trying to figure out a way to prove that the graphics group and its Pixar computer were worth Lucas’s time and investment. This was especially critical now that much of the digital editing equipment Lucas had asked for had recently been completed, at least in prototype, and unveiled in April at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas. The video editing console, called EditDroid, had impressed convention-goers with its sleek console, multiple video screens, and trackball controller; some thought it looked like it belonged on the Death Star. It didn’t always work—it had a tendency to lock up—but every demonstration still drew an enormous crowd, especially as team leader Ralph Guggenheim had smartly managed to snag a snippet of footage from Return of the Jedi to exhibit the machine’s editing capabilities. “People weren’t even looking at the editing system,” said one attendee.
“They just wanted to see Star Wars.”35 Meanwhile, the SoundDroid digital sound editing machine sat in the basement of Sprocket’s Building C. SoundDroid was less flashy than EditDroid but much more functional; director Miloš Forman had already put it to use to improve the sound quality for Amadeus.
Lucas now had the editing hardware he had asked for—or at least a start on it—but Catmull was still determined to prove that the value of the graphics group and the Pixar computer lay in filmmaking, not simply in hardware. In the weeks leading up to the 1984 SIGGRAPH conference in Minneapolis, Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, and their team had all five of Lucasfilm’s state-of-the-art computers—as well as a borrowed Cray computer in Minnesota—running round the clock, doing the work needed to render a two-minute animated film called The Adventures of Andre and Wally B. The film was mainly a showpiece for the capability of the Pixar, in which the cartoonish main character Andre is pursued by a bee through a fully realized environment of fields, forests, mountains, rocks, and roads. But with character designs by John Lasseter, both Andre and Wally B had real personalities, a trait that would make the film a pleasant rarity at SIGGRAPH.
Lucas would be in the SIGGRAPH audience for the premiere of Andre and Wally B—but only by happenstance; he was actually in Minneapolis to accommodate Linda Ronstadt, who was performing in the city that same week as part of the tour for her What’s New album. Smith swallowed his pride; he was just happy the boss would be there to see the film in person—and to see the audience’s response. As the lights went down at the Minneapolis Auditorium, Lucas and Ronstadt were quietly seated with Catmull and Smith, among a sea of thousands of SIGGRAPH attendees. It went better than Smith had hoped; the audience started roaring with the opening shot of computer-animated trees and continued right on through the closing credits. “People there know when they’re seeing something new and great,” said Smith. “I was of course thrilled, because I was the director of this piece and because George Lucas was there. He was finally seeing what he had.”36
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