Walter Murch was working on the film Cold Mountain (2003), based on the popular book, while I was there. When I saw the movie, I couldn’t get one scene out of my head. It was where Nicole Kidman decides to take tea down to the slave cabins because it is Christmastime. I was incredulous. While it may be that some person in the South could, at one time, have taken tea to a slave, this does not correspond to the fact that the slave owners also dug holes in the ground so pregnant female slaves could be laid down, belly first, and whipped for misbehavior. I’ve never seen a comparable Hollywood scene in a movie about World War II and Nazi slave labor. I think it is intellectually dishonest to rewrite history that far in a movie.
On the far other end of this spectrum, we were working on Ghostbusters II (1989) when a fellow who worked in the purchasing department came to me with a problem. In this huge comedy story, things famously go awry and we see the Statue of Liberty triumphantly march down the streets of Manhattan. In fact, things have gone so crazy in this movie that the historic ship Titanic has arisen from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean and arrives inexplicably at a dock in New York Harbor. It is more or less intact and shows the ugly gash on its side where it famously hit the iceberg that sunk it. We were building all these things in the ILM model shop and filming them for the movie.
I knew a guy named Ned from purchasing. We had gone out for drinks together. He was quite smart and for a time had supported himself as a gambler. He was outside of the FX group in the sense that he worked as a buyer for the company and was not really involved in our productions. However, everyone, no matter their job, generally followed what we were working on, and Ned especially so when it came to the model we were building of the Titanic. You see, Ned was an expert in all things relating to this famous sea disaster. He had read every book and article ever written about this ship. He belonged to the Titanic Society and flew back East to attend their annual meetings. One might say that Ned was obsessed with the topic.
Ned came to see me. He was nervous about even mentioning something like this, he said. He knew this was a big comedy they were making and it was all just silly fun but “that huge model they are building, with the giant gash on the side that the iceberg made, well, they’ve got the gash on the wrong side.” He didn’t know what to do. Should he say something and be perhaps taken for a fool? Who in the audience would possibly know this? What difference could it make? At this point, it would be expensive to fix.
Ned wanted to get out of the purchasing department and get into production someday. His question to me was, “Should I stick my neck out and bring this up to the producers or not? I don’t want my first visibility here to mark me as a troublemaker.” While pointing out costly errors to movie producers can be a hazardous business, I thought he should just mention it to one of our effects supervisors and let him take it higher if he thought it worthy. That way Ned would get some internal notice as a smart fellow where it counted. He worked for us, not the studio paying the bill.
The upshot was, he told them and it went to the studio for a decision. The producers said, “Of course we want it fixed. It’s a comedy, but we want it to be as accurate as we can make it.” Ned got out of purchasing and worked his way up over the years, becoming a producer that I sometimes worked with. Later in a wonderful example of “no good deed goes unpunished,” he and I wound up on opposite sides of most issues and he happily helped drive the final nail in my career coffin. But for now I was very much alive.
Earthquake
The only time I ever stayed overnight at the Ranch was back in 1989 when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit and caused a part of the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and the East Bay to fail, and I was concerned that I might not be able to get to work from my home in North Berkeley. My commute took me over the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge, but it occurred to me that they might either shut that one down to inspect it or the detour around the closed Bay Bridge might cause a traffic nightmare that would make me miss my appointments the next day. So I called Skywalker Ranch and made arrangements to stay there the next night; thus there would be no bridges between me and the office the next day.
Besides the Lucasfilm offices and the technical services buildings, there is also a small village-like area of the Ranch called the Farm Group, which comprises luxury apartments for visiting clients or guests. When directors are on location, they are separated from their families, so when they come back to Los Angeles to do their postproduction, they can lead a more normal life going home in the evenings, even if somewhat late. So it wasn’t enough to build a world-class postproduction facility: If George wanted to attract directors to this remote location, he had to offer a resort-like experience where the director’s family could come and join him. There were horses, a baseball field, restaurants, swimming pools, a lake, archery, hiking, etc. Still, it enjoyed only limited success in attracting directors. Once you drove thirty-five minutes from San Francisco, it was still many miles down a country road before you got to the Ranch entry road. Mel Brooks said, “The Ranch is all very nice, but I’m never going past San Rafael again in my life.” For me, it worked perfectly.
Each apartment is like a luxury condo and has a name of either a famous film director like Federico Fellini or Clint Eastwood or some other similarly noted artist or photographer. I don’t remember which unit I was assigned, but I do know that there must have been a music composer in the one above me because there was a thunderstorm that evening and he had opened wide his balcony doors and was playing a symphonic answer back at the storm. For every crack of thunder, he would roar back a response to it off what must have been a massive stereo. It was actually quite exciting.
The funny thing about this billion-dollar Ranch empire was that they never seemed to have any discretionary monies available to do things that any normal company would quickly authorize. The editorial department that I managed, for instance, held prints of Lucasfilm titles like all the Star Wars and Raiders movies. We had the Academy reels and some extra prints also. These prints belonged to ILM, but Lucasfilm headquarters at the Ranch was always borrowing them from me. We were using these titles as show reels and sales tools to attract multimillion-dollar projects so we could keep the doors open while George was pondering his next project. It finally got so bad that I stopped the new head of production, Charlie Maguire, in the hallway and said that I couldn’t understand why Lucasfilm—which, after all, had made these movies—didn’t own any prints of their own product. He said, “Send me a memo.”
It was all about “overhead,” and the company hated expenses that could not be assigned to a client billing number. So, often things didn’t get done that should have been done. Here you had this massive investment in the Ranch and it was not making enough money to justify itself. It must have been a bookkeeping nightmare for the accountants to make sense of all this. In addition, when George wanted to use some facility, he didn’t want to pay for it. He reasoned that it was his company and he could use whatever he wanted. So the management that was responsible for keeping the place solvent was in a tough spot. One told me that when George used a given company resource for one of his own projects, the manager not only didn’t get any rent, but he also couldn’t rent it to someone else. So he would get screwed financially twice in each occurrence.
This all brought about the “George said” phenomenon. Since there was no money available for a lot of projects and no one really had the authority to authorize any of these things, nothing got done unless George wanted it done. This caused people to go around pronouncing “George said [such-and-such] should be done.”
This inevitably led to the following: George was walking around the Ranch buildings with a small group of people one day and he casually mentions, “There should be a door there.” Weeks pass and he is again walking with the same group and notices the new door. Frustrated, he exclaims, “Just because I happen to mention something, that doesn’t mean everyone should stop everything and do it!” Sure enough, t
he next time he passes, the door is gone and it is impossible to tell that there had ever been a door there.
A corollary to this came from my friend Mike, who had the ill-fated Indian documentary project. Mike had been a beekeeper in his earlier days and got permission to put his boxes of honeybee hives out at the Ranch. If you want to grow crops, farmers know that you have to have honeybees around to pollinate them. Mike would harvest the honey every once in a while and he had Skywalker Ranch Honey labels made up, being sure that George got plenty of honey. After several years of doing this, a ranch manager called Mike up and said he needed to get his bees off the Ranch—people were afraid of them. So Mike took them home to Petaluma, where he lives in a beautiful early 1900s Craftsman-style home. Before long George finally reached the bottom of his last jar of Ranch Honey at breakfast and called his assistant, Jane Bay, to tell Mike he was out of honey and needed more. Mike explained to Jane that he had been told to get the bees off the Ranch property. The manager got a “George said” and as far as I know, the bees may still be there.
When I arrived at the company, there were already stories about a guy who took a lot of 16mm footage of the making of The Empire Strikes Back. He borrowed a company camera and used “short ends” of film raw stock that often are thrown away. When management learned what he was doing, he got a severe reprimand and could have lost his job. He did, however, eventually get the satisfaction of selling the footage to the production company when they realized they needed “making of the movie” footage for publicity purposes and didn’t have any.
I had my own experience with this when Patty Blau, the head of production, called me to her office, closed the door, and read me the riot act for Mike’s and my making of a documentary on how the full-motion dinosaurs were made for Jurassic Park. These resources could have been used for other purposes more in line with company goals, she yelled at me. Fortunately, I knew George’s editor at the ranch. He showed our film to George and George called the head of Lucas Digital, Jim Morris, who was Patty’s boss, to say how much he liked it. Now I had my own “George said” story for battle armor, so no one ever bothered me about it again. ILM still screens it once in a while, I’m told.
Finding Boonville
In 1990 I went back to Anderson Valley, where my aunt’s summer resort was located and where I had gone to high school. After eight years of production pressure, I had been looking for a weekend retreat for some time and was driving all over Northern California in my search. Returning from somewhere, I happened to stop for the night at a B&B in the Valley. When I got up I had breakfast with the couple who owned the place, and they started telling me about how much they loved living there.
That’s when it hit me: How come I had never considered Anderson Valley? This could be perfect. It is two and a half hours north of San Francisco, just far enough that you feel like you are somewhere else, but not so far you can’t frequent it often.
A lot of my childhood memories were slightly disastrous, but not here, not in the Valley. It was a child’s paradise, whose fond memories have never left me.
As a kid the Valley was all about timber, sheep, and apples, with a few summer resorts and kids’ camps thrown in. Now it was all vineyards, tasting rooms, and small organic farms, with a few apple farms and loggers. But unlike Napa and Sonoma, it is real. Best of all, my aunt’s resort is still there. It’s been changed by new owners, but it still looks like an old summer resort and I still swim there occasionally.
For me, perhaps the oddest thing of all is that “Shorty” Adams, the guy that drove me to high school fifty years ago, is still driving the school bus. At first I thought, how is that even possible? I spotted his hot-rod pickup and stopped him for an off-duty chat. “I’ve got over two million accident-free miles,” he said. It is very hard to be thought of as a “local” here, but my history on Shorty’s bus seems like a pedigree.
My neighbor Frank sells firewood. He runs a big operation out of another location in the Valley, but he used to sell to one customer out of the property next to mine, and that customer was Wolfgang Puck. The wood was for Spago, Puck’s restaurant in West Hollywood. Puck would send a semitruck to be loaded with oak firewood twice a year from Frank’s place.
Now, this is a long way to go to get oak firewood for your pizza ovens, but since it was the oak-fired pizzas that initially made Puck’s restaurant successful, he must have felt it was part of his trademark brand and he kept doing it.
They loaded the trucks just below my house every six months or so. Frank kept asking me if the noise bothered me early on weekend mornings. I told him I would let him know if it ever annoyed me. It never did, because I like living in a real country town where people work at real jobs, a town where they say even if you get a wrong number, you still talk for half an hour.
Boonville is also one of the only towns in the world that has its own language, or lingo, as they call it. Boontling is a type of speech that was invented by young people in the 1880s working in nearby hop fields as a way to talk freely among themselves when outsiders were around. My uncle could speak it, and I know a couple dozen words. Linguists have studied it widely and there is a book about it, so it will never completely die out. One local speaker was on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson several times giving demonstrations of it.
Boontling is mostly made up of nouns that represent local people or lore. People from the city are called “brightlighters.” “Collar jumpy” means irritable. A “horn of Zeese” is a cup of coffee because a man named Zeese was famous for his strong coffee and a “horn” is a cup in Boontling.
I’ve always known the Valley as a creative place. It is here where the author Alice Walker wrote her novel The Color Purple. She now resides in the Valley and once said that she tried to write the book in several places, like Los Angeles and San Francisco, “but my characters wouldn’t speak to me.” “When I got to Boonville,” she relates, “they wouldn’t shut up.”
Anderson Valley is a weekend home to Kary Mullis, who won the 1993 Noble Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of the polymerase chain reaction, aka DNA “fingerprinting.” He came up with his breakthrough idea on the last few twisty miles of Highway 128, which leads into the Valley. His friends later uprooted the highway mile marker that symbolized the place where he conceived his world-changing revelation and presented it to him as a gift. Mullis at the time worked for the Cetus Corporation in Emeryville, California. Cetus awarded Mullis $10,000 for his discovery and then sold the patent for $300 million. In the movie business, they at least give you another movie deal for those kind of profits.
This is my place for reading books and listening to music. Lately we have gotten broadband Internet here, so I can also stream movies and run my online businesses. My brother says that Boonville is an illusion, and it certainly is. How else could I be so interested in a place with so little to do? But it is precisely that illusion that enchants me. Like a painter forever painting the same scene, trying to capture the look of sunlight falling on nature, I chase the faint charms of this little rural town. I know what they are but am hard-pressed to describe them to others.
“Unheralded” is a word that I once heard to describe it. I’m borrowing this word from a wealthy San Francisco clothing magnate that weekends on the Mendocino coast. He said, “In the Anderson Valley you can participate in the blossoming of an extraordinary, still unheralded world.” There is something going on here that hasn’t reached the radar screens of the chic. In the end, this may be its saving grace—that what is here ain’t chic.
For instance, the other day I stopped by an organic farm that belongs to a neighbor. Usually I just select the vegetables set out for sale and count out my change from the little self-serve cash box there. But this day Vicki, who owns the place with her husband Mike, came out and said, “Would you like some corn?”
What a question. Would I like to walk with her into the cornfields with her tiny daughter Hann
a trailing behind us in her birthday suit to pull ears of fresh young corn from the stalk? Corn which I would be eating at my dinner table within an hour? Like a thirsting shepherd who has wandered out of the desert and is offered water from amongst an oasis of pools, I said yes as matter-of-factly as I could. Yes, I would like some corn.
So we headed out into the fields in the warm sun of the late afternoon, first stopping to admire the giant pumpkin crop that her husband was growing for the contests he enters every year. Little Hanna marched right up to one behemoth that was approaching 800 pounds and pulled back the netting that shaded this carefully nurtured specimen. “Daddy’s pumpkin,” she announced triumphantly.
As I looked around this idyllic farm with its original thirteen-star American flag flying high atop a pole planted securely amongst the organic crops, I thought of the imprint this simple ritual of going into the fields on the Valley floor surrounded by redwood forests on one side and rolling grassy hills on the other will make on this little girl, just as it did on me so many years before her. Hanna’s own senses were drinking it all in as she stumbled over dirt clods trailing mommy to the corn patch at golden hour in Boonville.
Are You OK?
I belong to a rather sketchy group, somewhere between carnival barkers and real estate developers. Only now we no longer have to resort to bearded ladies and fire-breathing pigs because technology has given us dinosaurs and meteorites, not to mention titanic sea tragedies.
We are a group with a questionable reputation, which comes from traveling players and vaudevillians, I guess. We didn’t always leave town having paid our hotel bills. Legend has it that that’s where the term “making the nut” comes from. Businesses got so burned with unpaid bills from traveling entertainers that the local sheriff, in the days of wagons, kept the wheel nut to the main wagon in his safe until all the bills were paid. No sneaking out in the middle of the night. You had to make enough money to at least pay your expenses, to “make the nut.”
Inside the Star Wars Empire Page 19
