Inside the Star Wars Empire

by Bill Kimberlin

  People knew I worked on big sci-fi movies, so I thought it would be funny to have a UFO detector in my home. I drew up some ideas and had an ILM artist make it look like something that could be built. Somehow I talked the model shop into building me a prototype out of cardboard and plastic. It had dials and switches and antennas that were supposed to rotate. I even thought of producing it commercially as a sort of Pet Rock kind of gag item. It would be guaranteed to sweep the area around your home to a depth of 300 feet, setting off an alarm should aliens be detected. My own house has been alien-free for years because of this device.

  This all led to an idea for a movie around 1999. What if a disgraced journalist was forced to take a job at the National Enquirer writing some of their elaborate hoax stories? You know, the ones with headlines like “Scientists Discover That Rome Was Actually Built . . . In One Day.” Let’s say this reporter goes out to make up a story about a spaceship landing behind some old farmer’s barn, only to find out that there actually is a spaceship there.

  My wife had already written a very funny screenplay that was a switch on the adolescent male coming-of-age story. Hers was an adolescent female coming-of-age story. She took my story and wrote a political comedy about a private investigator who investigated extraterrestrial claims. Our idea was that this would be a great vehicle for Jim Carrey. I had ILM do a cost analysis and shopped it to a studio where a former colleague had become a big producer. Here was our pitch:

  Titled UFO PI, this is an effects comedy with a role for a comic actor as a hard-boiled noir detective specializing in alien sightings. Using the Alien Detector he has invented, he uncovers a plot by an extraterrestrial to replace our politicians with kooks in an effort to gum up our national politics and slow down U.S. space exploration. Apparently it’s working.

  Our hero, Jack, is a cynical Bogart type struggling to work with a group of unbalanced clients, when in walks a real client. Unfortunately, Jack gets “implanted” and must go through peculiar physical transformations as he works to crack the case. At one point he even becomes partially female, which is a real obstacle to his courtship of the girl.

  That got us a read of our screenplay and the following response: “There are some genuinely funny bits here, as well as a good deal of professionalism in the writing. [It is] cleverly written as a vehicle for a rubber-faced over-the-top comedian.” (I still haven’t made a sale; however, there is still interest in the project.)

  When I got the budget estimate for doing the effects work on UFO PI, I mentioned how expensive it was to the vice president of Lucas Digital and he replied only partially in jest, “That’s what pays for your big salary, Bill.” That was a clear message. Come to think of it, no one had offered me a car either, like Zemeckis had demanded from Spielberg. Was my stock dropping?

  Stock was an apt metaphor here. Early in my career, I had learned to make friends with the company receptionists. Like mailmen, they knew everything. One was Karen. She was smart and capable, always broke and a little rough compared to the usual college girls they hired, but I liked her. She would hit me up for twenty bucks now and then to get her to payday, and I always obliged. If she got a phone call she didn’t know what to do with, she would ask me to take it. I got some great ones, but the best was from a guy who had rescued the neon sign from the original drive-in that was used as a location in American Graffiti. It read “Mel’s” in neon script lettering and can be seen just as “Directed by George Lucas” comes on at the opening to the movie.

  The guy wanted to see it go to somebody connected with the company, so I bought it for about $300. It was a little ragged from being outside over the years, but it worked and was authentic. I kept it for a while and then decided to sell it. But first I offered it to George. I sent him a letter with photos, and a few days later I got the letter back. His secretary had drawn two boxes in pen at the bottom of my letter: One was marked “Yes” and the other “No.” So I guess this is how business moguls make decisions. The “No” box was marked, and I felt free to sell it myself. The restaurant chain Planet Hollywood bought it for $10,000.

  Karen was a wealth of information in other ways as well. We were having some difficulties with one of the Star Trek movies, and the Hollywood studio suspected something. They sent a limousine full of executives to try to embarrass us about being behind schedule. Their problem was that the driver from the airport to ILM, who was one of many such drivers, was always the same guy. He didn’t work for us, but Karen had befriended him and he gave her a complete rundown on what the executives were up to. People say stuff in front of cab and limo drivers as if they weren’t there. We made sure we had a good presentation for them, and word got back from the driver that they were shocked to find how prepared we were.

  Karen got promoted to assistant to the vice president and general manager of ILM. I didn’t see her too much after that, but I do remember a time when I thought something was up and she called me to say, “Your stock is certainly rising.” And it did.

  I’ve always tried to steer clear of company politics except where survival was involved. Here it was decades later, and my stock was apparently now dropping. So I took up an offer to work some weekends out of the union hall in San Francisco. This was not an idea for a career change, just something to add to my experience. Plus I was always writing. Perhaps I could write about this line of work. As writer/director Nora Ephron had said, quoting her screenwriter mother, no matter what happens to you, “everything is copy”—fuel for your creative efforts.

  When ILM originally relocated from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, the union that adopted us was IATSE, or the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. This union covers all live theater, motion pictures, television, trade shows, and concerts in San Francisco and across the nation and Canada.

  Working out of the hall was a world away from Lucasfilm and ILM. I used to tell our union head that his outfit was designed to represent the equivalent of hod carriers but was representing rocket scientists at ILM. Now I was going among the real working people, the kind of people I documented in my Nitro movie, and I would get to see them up close again.

  One of the first jobs I was assigned to was setting up video displays at booths in a large hotel’s convention hall in San Francisco. First we took freight elevators deep under the hotel, down to the levels of sub-sub-basements that the general public never sees. Concrete roadways plunge deep down under these behemoth hotels, large enough for semitrucks to deliver tons of convention displays, furniture, video systems, platforms, audio equipment, whole showrooms of new model cars—whatever is needed.

  Offloading the trucks using forklifts was a surly gang of teamsters that looked more like fat Hells Angels than anything else. “Don’t touch my rig” was the mantra of these guys. Once it was off the truck, however, it was fair game. And we dove in, stacking pushcarts high with all manner of equipment. Our mantra was “put wheels under it.” It was as if any problem could be solved by simply underpinning it with some wheeled conveyance. And I must say it always seemed to work. These guys lived all over the Bay Area and were lucky to have jobs with union pay scales and someday—far, far off—a pension. They were young, too young to ever imagine that that day would ever actually arrive, but I wasn’t.

  They were proud of their hard work and generally had a good time. This was the era when drivers were starting to talk on cellphones in their cars, to the annoyance of other drivers, and one of our guys spray-painted the side of his car with huge letters that said, “Shut up and drive.” For this, he made the national news and we all had a good laugh, as we knew the feeling.

  I could understand why the famous writer/philosopher Eric Hoffer continued working as a longshoreman on the San Francisco docks long after he had received acclaim and could have easily left. Hoffer called his fellow workers “lumpy with talent,” and that is what I saw as well.

  Next, I went out on a Wheel of Fortune shoot. It was going to be
a special segment featured on several episodes to introduce the new line of General Motors cars as prizes on the show. Here, I was a camera assistant, while at the hotels I had been more of a video tech. All the locations were chosen because they were famous San Francisco sites with classic backgrounds for the cars, like the Palace of Fine Arts or Alamo Square where the “Painted Ladies” (beautiful Victorian houses) are the foreground to a postcard view of the San Francisco skyline.

  This crew was on a different plane from the stagehands. One guy owned the “sky crane” that could float the TV camera from twenty feet in the air down to ground level. It was all on a fancy gyro, so it rendered a wonderfully steady boom-down shot. He had worked the show for years, renting and operating his rig.

  All the tech stuff, like cameras and sound recorders, were still in transition and constantly changing, but all were digital. Most people in the camera crews were not experts in the fine details of the new cameras, but I met one who was.

  Specialized motion picture jobs had traditionally been hard to get, but the new digital technology created loopholes in the system. The fellow I talked to said, “They love to see me coming onto the set because I know the intricate menu systems that allow digging down into the computer software that operates these high-tech cameras.”

  There have always been walls around the choice jobs, whether it was fresco painters at the Vatican or senior engineers at Ford Motor Company. There is a story about a craftsman from the old country that was working at a Ford plant in Michigan. He was very skilled. One day a man came up behind him at his forming machine and was impressed with his work.

  “Where did you learn to do that?” the man asked.

  “I learned my trade in the old country,” the worker replied.

  “Then, why are you not working at the Ford Rouge plant?”

  “Because they told me I would have to know somebody to work there.”

  “Well, you know somebody now.”

  The man walked off and the worker asked the fellow on the next machine, “Who was that?” The other operator said, “That was Henry Ford.” The craftsman later became a senior Ford engineer.

  Just as in the rest of the movie world, the crew was full of gossip. On this show it was about Vanna White. “She’s pushing fifty and her twenty-five-year-old boyfriend just dumped her.” That was for openers. Then, “She owns three Learjets and flies all over the world giving speeches and raking in endorsement money.” That was the gist of it, sex and money. All I saw was a poised and experienced player. When she came out of her trailer she knew her lines, acted like a professional, and was polite to everyone. From my observation, those are the hallmarks of big bucks and a long career.

  This was one of the last places I worked outside of ILM, and I did it just for the experience. I wanted to see how the real people in my union fared. These were, for the most part, the same guys that I had documented in my movie: salt of the earth, brave, honest (for the most part), and vulnerable. I could navigate the financial markets, the real estate markets, the equity markets, and the labor markets, but I could see that they couldn’t. Not all couldn’t, but most. Thank God they belonged to a union. They had a pension. But what if the union collapsed?

  It did eventually collapse for Lucasfilm and ILM. George hired a union-busting law firm and got the union thrown out. It was after I left, but I had seen it coming and I would not be sticking around to see that happen. So I started looking for another project I might develop for myself.

  Criminal Behavior

  For a short time there was a magazine called Prison Life and it was somewhat like People except it was for current and former convicts. Since the United States has the largest prison population in the world, it seemed like something that could be successful, especially considering the group included everyone who had ever served time. There are tons of these guys floating in and out of our huge prison systems. Most of them read, and a surprising number of them can write quite well. The local newspaper in Boonville, where I spend part of the year, prints their letters to the editor all the time. (Recently, I learned that a current version of Prison Life still exists, with articles like “Felon Friendly Apartments.”)

  One month the cover article in Prison Life was about an uneducated ex-con named Dennis McKee. He was a flamboyant small-time crook and con artist who had turned his life around while on parole, after years of crime sprees, prison breaks, car thefts, and at least one bank robbery. He was a street-smart charmer who had the gall to borrow money from the bank he had robbed to fund a business venture and invent a new life for himself.

  Dennis was the flip side of the other criminal character I had written about, Willie Sutton. Sutton had attained national attention for his robberies and prison breaks. He was the real deal. Dennis was an unknown but still fascinating character. So I bought his “life rights” and in 2001 flew down to Katy, Texas, where he lived, to spend a week with him. I shot film and recorded his stories so an actor would have reference to his character, voice, and mannerisms. I really didn’t know what this was going to be, but it is the kind of investment I like to make. I may have been shadowboxing with myself, with no chance at a title shot, but I didn’t care, I could still be in the game. Besides, it might make a book or at least an article, maybe even a movie someday, although I knew that was the longest of long shots.

  Dennis picked my wife and me up at the airport in a new black Lexus. The car had one of the first navigation screens built into the dashboard and was quite a novelty at the time, especially since it added about $5,000 to the price of the car back then. The first thing he said to us was, “I drive real fast.” That Lexus was rarely under 100 mph. Dennis was part wild man, part innocent, and had a huge need to be connected to something, almost anything. He also had a mania for things that would set him apart and show his success. He had credit cards made up listing him as “Dr. McKee,” thinking it would get him better seating at restaurants, for instance, and it did. But was he dangerous? We were going to be staying at his house but I didn’t know much about him. I slept uneasily the first night, thinking that maybe I had jumped into this too quickly.

  Things got better in the morning but no less bizarre as Dennis rolled out his story for us. “I’m not ashamed of anything I ever did. My momma was a hooker and my gramma was a drunk, who beat me half to death. We was dirt poor in Alabama when I was born. I didn’t have so I stole, and stole and stole.” It was a tale of poor white trash in abject Southern poverty sometime in the late 1950s, as near as I could make out.

  Now he lived in a nice house with a swimming pool and luxury cars parked in the driveway. But the years of criminal activity and a revolving door life in and out of prison had taken a toll. He was an anomaly, an unexpected result of the American penal institutions. A statistical aberration who should not be free. He was the frog who at the last possible second unaccountably jumped out of the pot that was about to boil. His last stretch was in a federal prison, and at his final parole meeting they told him, almost to the month, when he would return, because they all return—except for Dennis.

  I had no idea how much there was to learn about how our prison system actually functions until I talked to Dennis. For instance, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, it didn’t affect just black people—it was a sea change for any oppressed group, including prisoners. There hadn’t been a civil rights act since 1875. Prisoners could be beaten, strangled, shot, or pumped full of drugs. They had no rights until sometime after 1964. It was a collateral positive for Dennis. He now had rights.

  Early on Dennis faked insanity in prison in an effort to escape from a less secure facility, but the ruse backfired. Prison hospitals had become heavily staffed by Cuban doctors who had escaped the revolution that had overthrown the dictator Batista. Their methods were primitive and included shock treatments using ice and insulin injections. Patients were put on long-term treatments of the tranquilizer drug Thorazine, which put
s the patient into an almost catatonic state but still able to manage a slow walk commonly called the Thorazine shuffle.

  As prisoner rights slowly began to assert themselves, Dennis was noticed by a renowned criminal defense attorney named Bob Tarrant, famous for putting cops in jail on corruption charges. Tarrant ordered the prison to get Dennis off Thorazine so he could consult with his new client. He was not a person that the authorities wanted to tangle with. Tarrant was known for his withering interrogation skills and his work ethic of winning, not plea-bargaining. He had been described as “fearless and feared, a take-no-prisoners, scorched-earth defender of the damned. No case was too hard and no client was too hopeless.” This then was the man who had come to the defense of the Dennis McKee who sat before me in Katy, Texas, a small town just outside Houston.

  Dennis was serving a 120-year sentence for a prosecutor’s briefcase full of charges. Using the novel defense that since Dennis had been declared insane years ago, he wasn’t actually responsible for his subsequent actions and therefore deserved to be paroled, Tarrant was able to break down many of the charges one by one and negotiate deals on the rest. As a somewhat feared litigator who lectured on the Constitution and criminal law, he got his way. Dennis was paroled into the custody of the attorney, who eventually gave him a job as an “investigator” doing those gray-area jobs that lawyers cannot be seen doing themselves, but at which Dennis was an expert.

  As Dennis took us through his life story, a powerful but misdirected personality began to emerge. He had been street smart and determined to wipe away the destitute life he was born into. Stolen cars, high-speed police chases covered by the media, bank robberies, scams, swindles, parking meter thefts, and many successful but short-lived prison breaks became his life. On the road and bored, he would randomly call up local switchboard operators and charm them into dating him. He impersonated country-and-western stars and threw honorary dinners for himself paid for by local radio stations duped into believing he was actually someone he only resembled. He also got married a lot, always to very young women that he more or less rescued from dreary lives in small Southern towns they would never have had the courage to leave on their own.