Inside the Star Wars Empire
Page 17
At a time when interest rates were 2 to 3 percent a month, John Mason was building and expanding his businesses. He had survived recessions, depressions, and bank failures. He had survived the suspension of his business during the Civil War and the vigilante committees, leaving the city in 1892 before it was destroyed by the earthquake and fire of 1906. He was a pioneer of early San Francisco and a tough act to follow.
So I had found some real history here, but beyond that it helped explain this unusual occupation I had chosen. It was all right to do this kind of crazy stuff in San Francisco, or else why would you be here?
Back to the Future III (BTTF III) Shooting large miniatures from camera car. Pat Turner on camera. Photo Credit: © Industrial Light & Magic. All Rights Reserved.
BTTF III. Crash and burn at my stepfather’s old rock quarry. Photo Credit: © Industrial Light & Magic. All Rights Reserved.
BTTF III. We rarely missed a chance to blow something up whether it needed it or not. We called it movie logic. Photo Credit: © Industrial Light & Magic. All Rights Reserved.
ILM model shop masters Steve Gawley and Bill Beck. Photo Credit: © Industrial Light & Magic. All Rights Reserved.
Setting up BTTF III shot. Visible from left: Chuck Ray, Scott Farrar, Pat Turner. Photo Credit: © Industrial Light & Magic. All Rights Reserved.
BTTF III. Mounted DeLorean for flying shot. Larry Tan. Photo Credit: © Industrial Light & Magic. All Rights Reserved.
Shooting E.T. space ship. Left to right: Marty Brenneis, Dennis Muren. Photo Credit: © Industrial Light & Magic. All Rights Reserved.
The Hunt for Red October (HFRO). Sub model on smoked set to simulate under sea. Pat Sweeney camera. Photo Credit: © Industrial Light & Magic. All Rights Reserved.
HFRO. ILM Main stage with large sub model. Kim Smith model maker. Photo Credit: © Industrial Light & Magic. All Rights Reserved.
Roger Rabbit. Pencil test to check action before painting cells. Photo Credit: © Industrial Light & Magic. All Rights Reserved.
Final painted animation cell. Photo Credit: © Industrial Light & Magic. All Rights Reserved.
Bob Hoskins working with water rig. Roger cells will lay over this live action film. Photo Credit: © Industrial Light & Magic. All Rights Reserved.
Final look of Roger and Hoskins. Real water. Photo Credit: © Industrial Light & Magic. All Rights Reserved.
Jedi Space Battle shot #19 (cover photo) was also used for this poster. Author’s Collection
Bob Hoskins pleads for a parachute as he is falling in Roger Rabbit’s Toontown. Photo Credit: © Industrial Light & Magic. All Rights Reserved.
American Nitro artwork. Author’s Collection
This Roger Rabbit storyboard image says it all, but note the poor fellow being launched. Author’s Collection
Ken Ralston note left on my desk during Roger Rabbit. Author’s Collection
Mike Gleason as Hitler. Author’s Collection
My ILM 20 year distinguished service award. Author’s Collection
My aunt Druie carried this letter to me. First woman to win the 100 miles in 24 hours Tevis Cup Award. Author’s Collection
Santa Barbara Beanie Babies Mansion. Author’s Collection
Mysterious gate to the Ty Warner’s Beanie Babies Mansion. Author’s Collection
Undergoing a painful Mars Attacks! interrogation. Author’s Collection
Dennis McKee, reformed bank robber, with my screenwriter. Author’s Collection
Dennis McKee relaxing at home. Author’s Collection
My grandfather Clint Mason’s bootlegging truck as it looked when I discovered it in Anderson Valley. Author’s Collection
Gordon Getty’s jetliner as I approached the back entrance. Now I’m spoiled for any other way to travel. Author’s Collection
So-called “Girl Head” attached to every roll of negative before printing. Yes, it is off color but this one I’m sentimental about. Author’s Collection
My Harvey’s Wagon Wheel slot machine. Sometimes I’m the sucker feeding in quarters and other times I’m the house emptying the cash box. Author’s Collection
My great-grandfather, “The Seed King” J.M. Kimberlin. They say he was not a man to be trifled with. Author’s Collection
Jim Carrey in makeup for The Mask but before the C.G. animation was added. An example of mixing practical makeup with C.G. Author’s Collection
My great-grandfather’s mansion in Santa Clara, California, 1909. Now Silicon Valley. Author’s Collection
Large Jurassic Park ship model in front of the ILM shooting stage. This was crashed into a model shipping dock for the movie. Made a spectacular shot. Author’s Collection
Kern River Oil Field near Kimberlina. They struck oil at 8 feet and I’m out billions of dollars. Author’s Collection
This was a crew gift for working on The Mask. Author’s Collection
My grandfather Clint Mason (top right photo) appears under a lurid headline to the horror of my family. Author’s Collection
My mother and older brother on my first trip to Boonville, where I now have a small ranch. I was three months old. Author’s Collection
Original lithograph of my great-grandfather John Mason’s early San Francisco Brewery. Author’s Collection
Dennis McKee’s Lexus with Pepsi 1 plates. Like a wild bird, once Dennis imprinted on the Pepsi brand he was a loyal fan for life. Author’s Collection
We often made custom crew shirts for our films. This represented our challenge for Schindler’s List. Author’s Collection
Library of the Stone Age Institute with the skulls of our ancient ancestors on display, instead of the usual busts of the great men of history. Author’s Collection
My UFO detector design. I am alien-free thanks to this baby. Author’s Collection
View from my country house in Boonville. Author’s Collection
Always a surprise when switching on the light and entering a room at ILM. Author’s Collection
Jurassic Park
The making of Jurassic Park (1993) was a major turning point in motion picture history. Spielberg was all set to make it using traditional stop-motion animation. He had hired Phil Tippett, who now had his own special effects company and was the master of stop motion and the genius behind animating the AT-AT (All Terrain Armored Transport) Walkers sequence in The Empire Strikes Back and many other equally impressive works. Everything had been costed out and was ready to go. Stan Winston would handle the huge robotic models that could be intercut with Phil’s miniature models.
Yet, behind the scenes at ILM, our resident bad boy Steve “Spaz” Williams and his colleagues, Mark Dippé and Stephen Fangmeier, were working on what they felt was a better solution to creating what would come to be known as “full-motion” dinosaurs.
Motion is a funny thing to try to capture. Man has been trying to duplicate it in his art since the earliest cave paintings that we know about. Those ancient artists added extra legs to the animals they were trying to depict as running. When motion pictures first appeared, they were startlingly lifelike while at the same time they flickered and the images seemed to jump rather than flow. Eventually refinements in steadying the camera’s speed, adding a revolving shutter, and registration pins to cement the image down briefly during exposure produced a smoothly flowing projected image.
However, there is another element to the experience of re-creating motion and that is called “motion blur.” It is perhaps best understood by imagining the little tricks that a cartoonist uses to depict speed in his drawings. A rapidly turned head, for instance, might be depicted with multiple heads in different positions, with swirl marks added to suggest speed. It is that slight blur that makes the reproduction of movement look effortles
s in moving images. I once showed a commercial client the film we had shot of a huge model of the San Francisco city and bay. As I displayed it for him on one of our giant VistaVision viewers, I stopped the film to point out a detail and he remarked, “That frame is not sharp.” Without going into detail, I simply said that he would not like it very much if all the frames were razor sharp—that’s not how the magic of movies works. He seemed to buy that, and we moved on.
By the time of Jurassic Park, Phil and others had developed a stop-motion system called “go motion,” which allowed models to move during the exposure of a given motion picture frame, rather than just clicking off frames only when the model was at rest. While not perfect, the addition of a slight blurring enhanced the smoothness of the movement when the film was projected.
Phil’s expertise and the advancements in traditional stop-motion animation gave everyone confidence that these movie dinosaurs could be pulled off. Still, there was a small group in the computer graphics department that thought otherwise. They had been told that computer animation was not yet up to the task and they were not to pursue it. Besides, management thought it would be vastly more expensive even if it was possible to do it.
Somewhat undercover, Spaz and Mark built a so-called wireframe version of a walking T. rex in their computers. The movement was quite realistic-looking even in this primitive state where the dinosaur is seen only as a shape somewhat resembling something made out of chicken wire. Spaz was in the habit of letting this image run in a loop on his computer screen, especially when important visitors came on tours. One important visitor was Kathleen Kennedy, Spielberg’s longtime producer. “What’s that?” she asked Spaz. “Oh, just something we have been fooling around with,” he replied. Of course, he also explained that he was convinced that the whole movie could be done in computer graphics.
Normally, this is the kind of conversation that management works diligently to make sure never takes place. There is justification for that. I once had a projectionist that would intervene in conversations between directors and important clients, right from the projection booth, introducing his thoughts on whatever subject might be being discussed. But this intervention was different. When you are paying a lot of money for wildly talented artists to come up with creative solutions to problems, you have to have some flexibility. It’s called managing creative people, and my former colleague, Ed Catmull, wrote a whole book on the subject called Creativity, Inc. Unfortunately, a lot of Ed’s insights were not given much credence at ILM.
But when Steven saw the tests that had been done by our bad boy Spaz, he authorized a budget for seeing if this creature could be fleshed out, literally. So a camera crew was sent out to film a background into which a much more sophisticated creature could be placed. A new wireframe was created and then muscles and skin added to an animal that seemed to be stalking its prey. Lots and lots of further detail would have to be added to make this thing work, but the basic movement was almost flawless and way beyond what stop-motion animation, even go motion, could ever achieve. As Spaz told me privately later, “When Steven saw this, he went nuts and announced that all the animation in Jurassic Park would now be done with computer graphics.”
It was Dennis Muren who was in charge of these special effects. No matter how they were done and no matter how talented certain individuals might be, Dennis had the responsibility to make it work. While he may have been skeptical initially, he was now on board and would oversee all the small details that made those dinosaurs come to life. When a dinosaur stomped on wet ground, splashes of real, not animated, water were added to tie the creature to the landscape. When the T. rex attacks the kids in the overturned SUV, a full-size, pre-crushed SUV was produced as reference for the computer animation artists to re-create it with photorealistic accuracy.
Elsewhere I mention that I made an internal ILM documentary to immortalize all this, and in it I interviewed Phil Tippett at his studio. He told the story of how he learned on a Friday afternoon that Steven had decided to dispense with all stop-motion work and replace it with computer graphics. This was a momentous turning point in Phil’s life. Everything he had ever learned now seemed to be obsolete. Phil cupped his palms together in front of my camera and then slowly opened them to simulate what he described as “bomb bay doors opening under my life” as he fell into the abyss below. Over the next decade this same thing would happen to many, many talented people.
Although Phil went through what must have been a dark weekend, he rallied on Monday as Dennis called him and said, “Look, you are still on the picture, and no one knows animal movement and the archeology of it like you.” Phil adapted, changed course, and directed the computer animation. He actually got cranky computer nerds out of their chairs, making them move and imitate the animals they were going to create. They hated leaving their keyboards, but Phil was an unrelenting drill sergeant and they obeyed. As one animation painter later told me, “We started out trying to do things procedurally [draw a detail and let the computer duplicate it exactly] but it didn’t look right. It was too uniform, and nature is not like that. But when we tried doing it by hand, the very randomness of that approach began to more correctly simulate a creature in nature.”
In the end it wasn’t all computer graphics. There were animatronic animals, models, practical effects like breakaway trees, live-action wire work that made props move on set, makeup, and tons of elements like smoke, water, dust, fire, and brush to enhance the sense that creatures were actually in the scenes. Invariably it was these little things, the small touches, that sold the big shots.
Jurassic Park was a massive hit and it changed a lot of lives, mine included. Spaz was back in business and would go on to do CG work on a scene in the restoration of Return of the Jedi that George had had to drop in the original version because it looked so fake. This restoration of Spaz reminded me of a comment Abraham Lincoln had made when told that General Grant was a drinker: “I can’t spare this man—he fights.”
Schindler’s List
We had talked with Steven Spielberg in Poland every day over a secure video line that cost a fortune. Back home and summering in Martha’s Vineyard, he started one conference session with, “I just had lunch on the most beautiful yacht.” I could easily imagine it. The Great Gatsby had nothing on this guy.
Dailies comprised camera footage of Nazis burning dead bodies, and no one wanted to attend them because they were so depressing. Steven was essentially making two movies at the same time. He was finishing Jurassic Park for a summer 1993 release, and he was also working on Schindler’s List to be released later that same year. Whether in Poland or summering on Martha’s Vineyard, we communicated through a device called Image Net.
Usually we only saw the sequences that included our work, not the entire rough cut. There were exceptions, but this was the general rule, so we often couldn’t make our own personal judgments about any project until much later in the process. During this time a lot of footage was coming into my editorial department every day. We all trudged to the screening room mostly in a grim mood because we knew it was going to be unpleasant to view this stuff. How else could one describe the miles of footage we had to watch of dead bodies being piled up using some kind of conveyor belt system the Nazis had designed for efficiency. It was all fake, of course, but it wouldn’t look fake when we got through with it. That was our job, that’s what we did for a living, to try to make you forget it is just a movie.
So how is this movie going to work for a mass audience? I was asking myself. Will he terrorize the audience to make a personal statement? My Aunt Leonore used to say, “I go to the movies to be entertained. I have enough sadness in my life.” I didn’t necessarily agree with this sentiment, but I always polled my family for their opinions since they were more representative of the country than I would ever be. Yet, I still remembered something the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir had said: “There are enough disagreeable things in life. I don’t need
to paint more.” Who was right, if anyone?
As mentioned, we had developed a device we called Image Net, which was a secure video/phone system. This technology wasn’t really new, but the way ours was tricked out was a lot more user-friendly than others at the time. Initially each viewer would see a full-screen image of the other party via the satellite linkup. This allowed each party to greet the other and engage in some small talk before getting down to business. It seems that the more you can personalize technology, the more people are comfortable using it. I had heard of many directors who abandoned these devices, but they seemed to be OK with ours.