Inside the Star Wars Empire

by Bill Kimberlin

  Entertainers have been looked down upon since Roman times. In fact, when the Roman Coliseum was opened in AD 80, some groups were banned altogether from attending, notably gravediggers and actors.

  Once we got to Hollywood, things were different. No wagons. But a common sign in the front window of rooming houses was one that said No Movies, which is what moviemakers were called. And that was really the essence of it, wasn’t it? They moved. Above all else, movies moved. The wonder of it. It reminds me of the Internet. Do you remember seeing a movie on the Web in the early days? We were all so thrilled (and some not so thrilled) even though it looked worse—much worse—than an early Edison Kinetoscope. What’s the famous line about the dancing bear? “The marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that it dances at all.”

  We are dancing very well now, and we actually have at least one PhD running a movie studio: Dr. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. Is nothing sacred? Will we soon have Las Vegas casinos with PhD pit bosses? If it hasn’t happened already, I predict it.

  There is one thing about movies, however, that hasn’t changed yet: They are still about people. I claim that there has never been a movie made without some variation of the line, “Are you OK?” Try to find one. That’s because movies are about us.

  It is currently popular for movie tycoons to say that they only really care about the story. To me, the story is just the conveyer belt; emotion is the package being delivered. I always thought William Faulkner had it right when he said in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature that the only things worth writing about were “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.”

  It had gotten to the point where I wasn’t OK. I didn’t want to live my life with less class than a TV dinner. The management at work actually started calling everyone artists. I had to raise my hand at a manager’s meeting to say, “I am not an artist.” There is no doubt that there were artists there—I just couldn’t accept the cheapening of the term by including everyone. As Groucho Marx once said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”

  My focus had changed. I had started reading Michel de Montaigne, the famous philosopher who introduced the essay to literature and whose philosophy of life could be summarized as “slow down enough to realize that you are alive and pay attention to that.” It was all well and good to work for a big-shot movie company, but what was I doing for myself? What was I doing on my own? This could all end tomorrow. I needed to make a living, but I also needed to find more about myself and where I came from. Like an adopted child seeking out his biological parents, I sought out what happened to the Kimberlin Seed Company and Mason’s Brewery.

  Mason’s Distillery

  It took me a while to figure it all out, but there had been a murder, and all the lurid headlines that go with something like that. There was also a kind of strange backstory to all this that I accidentally happened upon.

  During film school I had come up to my aunt’s summer resort to shoot some scenes for a student film I was working on called Remnants. I was attempting to portray a series of iconic images of old barns, gravestones, and abandoned farm equipment when I discovered some old trucks on the apple farm near my aunt’s place. I shot film of them and forgot all about it.

  Years later when I called the owner of the farm to see if the trucks were still there so I could photograph them again, he told me, “One of those old trucks is an REO Speed Wagon. It used to belong to your grandfather, Clint Mason. He had it all set with hidden compartments to haul bootleg liquor.” No one had ever mentioned this to me before, so I started to look into it.

  I found a large color lithograph of my great-grandfather John Mason’s brewery on Chestnut Street, in the North Beach section of San Francisco. It was an advertisement for the original Mason family business, which eventually moved across the bay to the town of Sausalito in 1892. The new location was on fourteen acres, allowing for a much larger distillery that could produce Irish and Scotch whiskeys in addition to beer.

  In the 1920s Mason’s was selling 60,000 cases a month from the distillery. But by 1925 my great-grandfather was dead; my grandfather and his brother were running the distillery and Prohibition had arrived. However, even with Prohibition laws in full swing, Mason’s Distillery was producing, under government license, nearly one-sixth of all the industrial alcohol manufactured in the United States.

  There was no federal law against owning alcohol or consuming it, just manufacturing and selling it without a government contract, so it was extremely difficult to stem the tide of booze that was washing over the country. In just one 1926 shipment of 6,300 gallons of licensed alcohol from the Mason plant in Sausalito, 1,200 gallons went missing from a guarded and sealed railroad boxcar—enough to make over 300,000 drinks. I found a newspaper article saying that my great-uncle, John Mason Jr., explained to the local investigators that he was doing everything possible to comply with the law, and then invited them in for a drink.

  To much of the nation, Prohibition was a joke that spawned speakeasies, defiance, and gangsters. Winston Churchill summed it up on a visit to the United States. “In Britain,” he said, “we realize over 100 million pounds from our liquor taxes, an amount I understand you give to your gangsters.”

  In an effort to diversify from the distillery business, Grandpa Clint and his brother branched out into real estate, developed a soda works company, and built a four-story downtown garage to capture the commuters, having already contracted with the federal government to make medicinal and industrial alcohol. But it wasn’t enough: Prohibition was killing their business; they needed more income.

  That income came from bootlegging. It became possible to make money by merely spiriting alcohol out the back door of their own distillery. The whole country was being happily introduced to speakeasies, blind pigs,1 and the Jazz Age. It was suddenly the Roaring Twenties, and the world had changed.

  With some research, I found that they shipped the booze to San Francisco in five-gallon containers hidden in a truck designed to hold them. The truck would go on one of the car ferries leaving hourly from Sausalito.2 That was the truck I had stumbled upon shooting an early movie. They drove that same truck right onto the ferryboats.

  There was also, I learned, a new arrival in Sausalito that worked in my grandfather’s downtown garage. His real name was Lester Gillis but he hid under a fake last name: Nelson. As a local man later remarked, “He was a nice-looking man, that’s why they called him ‘Baby Face.’” Baby Face Nelson, the famous bank robber and partner of John Dillinger, was lying low and doing odd jobs for my grandfather.

  All of this was difficult to process, let alone piece together some eighty or more years later. My family wouldn’t talk about it and I understood that, but it left me dangling. How bad was it?

  Further research led me to a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle of May 23, 1930, that screamed “Gangster Killed Rum Informer, Shot Woman to Cheat Death Plot, He Charges.” The subheading had photos described as “Slayer, Victim and Principals in Gang Murder, Rum Trial.” My grandfather’s picture was prominently featured as the “principal.” No wonder no one in the family would talk about it. Grandfather Clint Mason had been arrested and was on trial on bootlegging charges when a Prohibition informer was shot and killed. No matter how much pain this history had caused my family, it was possible movie material now.

  Were they gangsters? Did they actually get involved in murders? I needed to get to the truth if possible. I certainly wasn’t going to allow some Hearst-type yellow journalism define my family—not if I could find a different story.

  The killer had the perfect Runyonesque name of “Pegleg” Lucich. He shot a man named Nick Sturtevant near the town of Bodega, north of San Francisco, where the Masons had built another illegal still on an old ranch. Both of these guys worked for, or sold booze to, my grandfather. Aside from local pro
ducers of booze like my family, Canadian ships sat off the coast dispensing hundreds of cases of choice whiskey to rumrunners who dared to make for the shore in overloaded high-speed boats. If the federal agents didn’t catch them, the hijackers would. Sturtevant was a hijacker, another source for what was now our new family business.

  On the night of May 21, 1930, in the middle of my grandfather’s bootlegging trial, Pegleg murdered Sturtevant. The paper said that “Sturtevant was a hijacker who had been supplying Marin County millionaires with booze.” Pegleg was sent to San Quentin for life but got out in 1947, the year I was born. Was he protecting my family, or was it a personal squabble?

  Looking into it more closely, the whole thing didn’t make much sense. If there was a murder of a key witness in the bootlegging trial, it was a little late, because he had already given his testimony and the jurors had deadlocked and were dismissed. They were definitely selling booze, but the rest was newspaper innuendo and no other charges were ever made. However, it had its effect. Prohibition had done tremendous damage all across the country, but especially to those having businesses making wines or spirits

  My grandfather subsequently lost control of the distillery to its backers, who then sold it on the day Prohibition ended to the American Distilling Company. The ultimate fate of the enterprise was not met until 1963 when it burned to the ground in a spectacular fire. Today the old fourteen-acre distillery complex is the location of a large condominium project called Whiskey Springs, and I often drive by it on my way to my boat in the Sausalito Yacht Harbor.

  One curious artifact I uncovered in all of this was a letter from J. Edgar Hoover himself to the FBI office in San Francisco. In it he acknowledged that he was aware of what was happening in this area, but since Congress had seen fit to give the enforcement money to the Treasury Department and not the FBI, the local office was instructed to stay out of it. To me this largely accounts for the official squabbling and incompetence of it all.

  Finally, I knew what had happened. A family business founded in 1854 had been destroyed by government edict. It wasn’t going to bring my family back, but it did bring a sort of closure. All that was left was to find out what had happened to the Kimberlins and to see if I could somehow profit from it creatively.

  * * *

  1. A “blind pig” was an illegal bar said to be so obvious that a blind pig could find it.

  2. Clifford James Walker, One Eye Closed, the Other Red: The California Bootlegging Years (Barstow, CA: Back Door Publishing, 1999).

  Kimberlina

  The only thing I knew about my father were just stories about him. He was a well-to-do older man who had had children late in life, which is why when he died we became much closer to my mother’s side of the family, the Masons. However, I did know certain things. He was an avid hunter of deer, ducks, quail, and fish. This is why he had a gun locker in the basement. It was a small room filled with rifles, shotguns, and fishing gear. He was also a persistent golfer and had converted one of our garages at the big house in the city into a driving range so that he could practice his swing.

  In an effort to help piece together who my father was, I convinced my brother to take a trip with me to the town where he was born, in honor of what would have been his 120th birthday.

  At the center of California is a huge valley, about 50 miles wide and 450 miles long. It is very flat and produces more than half of the fruits, vegetables, and nuts for our entire country. The southern part is called the San Joaquin Valley. This valley is bisected by Highway 99 for almost its entire length. The region’s farm economy grew along this highway, which links California’s big cities to small, isolated towns like Tulare and Selma, where my father was born. It was along Highway 99 that John Steinbeck’s fictional Joad family traveled in The Grapes of Wrath. This is where the Dust Bowl migrants went looking for work, and where Dorothea Lange took some of the most famous Depression-era black-and-white photos ever shot.

  In Notes from a Native Daughter, Joan Didion wrote, “99 would never get a tourist to Big Sur or San Simeon, never get him to the California he came to see.”3 This is the authentic California of almond orchards, mangy farmyards, rusty train works, peach trees, and Depression-era hamburger stands.

  There was something else along Highway 99 that the tourists didn’t come to see, and this would make history. Something that no one knew anything about when my father’s family expanded there in the late 1800s just north of Bakersfield.

  I had always heard that my father was born in Selma, California, in 1884, but of course we soon learned that most anyone that lived in a rural area was born at home on the farm and just listed in the nearest town. We checked the county seat, which is Fresno and only about 17 miles away, with no idea about where they might have lived. Then we got lucky. We found a subdivision map that had been filed by J. M. Kimberlin for a town called Kimberlina. It was dated 1888. Slowly, with the help of vintage newspaper articles, a story emerged.

  After my great-grandfather J. M. Kimberlin became wealthy from his Santa Clara seed company, he decided to expand into wheat farming near his newly proposed town. Somehow he got the Southern Pacific Railroad to construct a rail stop right next to Kimberlina. It was all laid out with street names and everything, a complete plan. This in itself was a rather startling concept. In those days the wheat farmers were at war with the railroads. Frank Norris, who wrote the famous novel McTeague, which was made into the legendary Eric von Stroheim film Greed, also wrote The Octopus: A Story of California about the railroads crushing the wheat farmers in the San Joaquin Valley.

  Apparently J. M. Kimberlin was a tough old bird, and the railroads seemed to be no match for him. The newspapers referred to him as “Professor Kimberlin,” a nod to his long history with the College of the Pacific and reputation as a scholar of ancient languages. I found a photo of him standing on the steps of his mansion in Santa Clara, and he looks like a man not to be trifled with.

  Starting about 1882 the Kimberlins began acquiring land, until they were farming wheat on 10,000 acres. The farm was on Poso Creek near a town called Poso. (I couldn’t find Poso on any map, but I knew it used to be there somewhere.) With the Kimberlina railroad siding available to them, they could get freight cars to the market at Port Costa, which is just up the San Francisco Bay a little, towards Sacramento. Every year for eleven years their wheat was the first to arrive and therefore commanded the best prices. Their only problem was water, and the rains did not come. This whole thing was starting to reminded me of the mayor’s pleadings in the movie Chinatown: “Without water the dust will rise up and cover us as though we never existed.”

  But there is another movie that more accurately portrays what happened to my family next. It’s called There Will Be Blood, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and based largely on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair. I had met Anderson out at the Ranch while I was working on Gangs of New York. I would have loved to have asked him about his research on California, but I didn’t know then what I know now.

  My notes from recording Aunt Neva told me that they endured seven years of drought. That was all I knew. Evidently, they sold out and left the area. What became, I wondered, of the 10,000-acre wheat farm and the town of Poso on Poso Creek, not to mention Kimberlina?

  This happened over 110 years ago, and there has been no one left to ask for decades. I still don’t have the whole story, but I do know this: When they left Poso Creek in about 1906, they had been standing on, or near, one of the largest pools of oil in the world. The Poso Creek oil field was discovered in 1926 by the Calipose Petroleum Company. They struck oil at eight feet with their first well. The original report stated, “There is practically no water apparent.” Wonderful news for oil companies, disastrous news for farmers. They found eighty-eight million barrels of oil there. The Poso Creek oil field, I learned, is really an eastern extension of the Kern River Field, which is the third-largest oil field in
the country with two billion barrels.

  We couldn’t find the town of Poso because its name was changed to Famoso in 1895, so my father was actually born in Famoso. Today one of the most famous drag strips in the world is in Famoso, where we shot film for American Nitro not knowing the family connection. The railroad siding is still there, but Kimberlina was never built. All that is left is a highway turnoff sign leading to Kimberlina Road. Did my family ever learn about the oil? Eight feet is pretty shallow, even for the most primitive hand-dug water well, but I don’t think they ever did.

  At current prices I may be out about $60 billion in oil profits, and it might have been for me like the Norma Desmond rant in Sunset Boulevard: “I’m richer than all this new Hollywood trash! I’ve got a million dollars. Own three blocks downtown, I’ve got oil in Bakersfield, pumping, pumping, pumping.” But the reality is more like the characters at the end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, watching their gold dust blow back to the hills from which it came, and like them, all I can do is laugh.

  There is something primal in losing your home, family, and dog all at once. In never knowing who your parents were. They were strangers to me, and there is trauma in that. My prescription had been to find them through my ancestors, and it seems to have worked. I was functional again.

  * * *

  3. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster, 1979).

  The UFO Detector

  It was the model shop at ILM that really represented the heart and soul of the company. You never knew what you might find there. A Star Destroyer being tuned up for a museum tour, the Ford Tri-Motor airplane Indy used in Raiders 2, a one-sixth-scale mansion designed to split in half for Jumanji, or just R2-D2 in for repairs.