Inside the Star Wars Empire

by Bill Kimberlin

  In prison Dennis had watched movies and was even in a riot precipitated by the shutdown of a movie before it was finished. He had been in jail so long that he had never heard of home video. So when his lawyer said he was going to pop into a local video store before driving home, Dennis said, “What’s that?” Tarrant explained but it wasn’t until Dennis visited one for himself that he started to understand. On his first visit he was impressed to see all the movies for rent, but he had a question for the store owner: “What happens to all these videos once everybody in town has seen them?” The owner replied, “What do you mean what happens to them? Nothing happens to them.” That right there was the foundation of Dennis’s future small empire. He had an idea.

  Like most good ideas, it was rejected by everyone he knew, even his attorney. “Dennis, that will never work,” Tarrant told him. Good lawyer, bad businessman. This was a time when the number of video stores in the country was about to approach 30,000. The locations ranged in size from small mom-and-pop grocery stores to large national chains. Renting videos had become wildly popular, as home video players were owned by 65 percent of households in 1988.

  The source of these tapes were Hollywood sub-distributors who had a corner on the market, so the tapes were expensive to purchase, about $100 each for the studio releases, which were what everyone wanted to see. There were thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of small stores that couldn’t afford to buy many tapes at these prices, and they certainly couldn’t risk buying used tapes because they couldn’t tell if a given tape was defective or not. There wasn’t time to watch even one, let alone hundreds. Dennis had found an answer to this objection.

  Dennis invented something he called a video trader. For a fee, he would swap the tapes that wouldn’t rent anymore for ones that would—tapes the store customers hadn’t seen. This meant several fresh rentals for their store for less than $150. That was a lot better than $100 apiece, especially since the bad-tape risk was low, as these were tapes from other video businesses, not the general public. Dennis was so broke that he started trading tapes on foot, carrying them in a paper bag. But it worked and he started making money. Still, he needed to expand, so he went to a bank.

  He got the money to expand his business by borrowing it from the same bank he had robbed years earlier. His gall and charm intrigued the bank president, and instead of the $3,000 Dennis wanted to borrow, he gave him $20,000. When he purchased a van, cash flow improved and he could afford more vans to expand the areas he served throughout the South. He hired pretty girls to drive the vans since the video store owners were mostly men, and this also helped business. Soon he was opening his own video stores. “Truthfully, what made me was what made all home video, and that was porn video,” Dennis said. “There wouldn’t be no home video or no Internet either if it wasn’t for porn video. Hell, I had police officers stop me on the highways just so they could buy them porn tapes out of the back of my vans. There’s so much repression, especially in the South, that people couldn’t buy them quick enough.”

  One of many unusual things about Dennis was his almost obsessive loyalty to the soda brand Pepsi. He signed off all phone conversations with, “Have a great Pepsi day,” and his and his ex-wife’s Lexus LS400s had personalized license plates that said PEPSI 1 and PEPSI 2, respectively. When he was starting to buy video stores, he wanted to have popcorn and soda to sell to the customers, just like in the movie theaters. The Pepsi district manager spent hours setting up displays in the stores, and when Dennis asked the guy why, he said, “Because we want you to be successful, Dennis.” In many ways Dennis was like a lost child. His family had deserted him and he was searching for something to connect to, somewhere to belong. That somewhere became Pepsi. In convict logic, loyalty is everything. Later, when that district manager got the attention of Pepsi National and was promoted to a top executive position at Pepsi in New York, he and Dennis remained friends.

  Dennis got people’s attention as well. He had a powerful personality that snuck up on you without your realizing it. People wanted to help him. They just wanted to see him keep going. Local bank presidents and business executives couldn’t resist befriending him because he had such a great story: bank robber to businessman. He had a nice house now but with an unusual bedroom outfitted like an S&M parlor: handcuffs, chains, straps hanging from the ceiling—he thought it was funny. “Texas ladies are a little kinky and they are mostly disappointed when they find out the chains and stuff ain’t real.” It was all just for show.

  About this point I was starting to get worried. After all, I’m dealing with a self-admitted con man. Was all of this true? Could it be verified? If I ever do anything with this, would I wind up like one of those guys who gets exposed for research errors or fictionalizing large parts of his work? On the other hand, I reasoned, I wasn’t alone on this story—there was the magazine article I had read. That author was in a better position to know than I was, and he got it published. Besides, I thought, I will verify everything I can when I get back home, and if it ever gets to be a movie, I can always open with the title, “Most of what you are about to see is true, I think.”

  On the day we were leaving to fly back to San Francisco, Dennis called me aside and told me that he had an idea for his funeral casket. He had designed a coffin that was a giant replica of a can of Pepsi. He was so excited that he had called his executive friend in New York early that morning to tell him about it. While he had to admit Pepsi National wasn’t all that encouraging, they didn’t say he couldn’t do it.

  Today, the long-since-reformed Dennis is a semiretired businessman still living in Katy, Texas. His is the life of any normal boring citizen, just like you or me, except not quite. He currently owns a company called International Light Bulbs. I don’t know what international light bulbs are or what his angle is, but I do know that there is one.

  Back in the bad old days, Dennis formed a bogus company and convinced department store managers to allow his group to pose as shoplifters to test a string of stores for what he called “security vigilance.” He named it the Theft Reduction Analysis Program, or TRAP. It was a license to steal.

  When I was around Dennis, his tales of adventures never stopped, and I rolled them into a screenplay that may still get made. I pitched it to the director Oliver Stone and he seemed interested. I hope so, because the story of this fascinating man shouldn’t just end here on these pages.

  The China Girl

  Working on my own projects again lifted my spirits and reminded me why I was so interested in filmmaking to begin with. I took a lady friend to lunch one afternoon at Skywalker Ranch’s main house dining room. Afterwards we walked through the living room and the library with its huge stained glass ceiling. She commented that the artwork displayed was all about the human form—the hands, the human body, the face. Over the mantle there was a large Norman Rockwell painting, Peach Crop (1935), portraying a beautiful young girl lying in a barn of some type. She is surrounded by ranch hands. Perhaps she has fainted, as the boys look on with a wonderful mixture of passion and concern on their faces and in their body language. A good art piece tells a story and evokes emotion. This was a movie scene.

  One of the things you really have to get right in a movie is how people look: the human form, especially the face, because we are all so familiar with it. The eyes, the mouth, skin tone—we have hundreds of thousands of years of evolution in detecting the meaning of the slightest change in expression in the human face. Motion picture cameras catch all of this, and exceptional actors’ faces are capable of expressing the subtlest of emotions whatever the requirements of the scene. It is really true that the camera loves some people and not others.

  While we were shooting scenes for Cocoon 2, we were also working on the ill-fated Howard the Duck starring Lea Thompson. While I was heading to dailies for both films one day, I stopped by the second-floor kitchen, where there were usually some bagels or pastries, and an actress from Cocoon 2 was th
e only other person in the room. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in person. She had a movie star’s face, with jet black hair and vividly blue eyes.

  When I got to dailies, both Lea and the other actress were in the room. Lea had her hair up in curlers and may have just come from makeup. The dark-haired beauty was the one making waves in the room—that is until the projector started to roll. I watched both their scenes and Lea just jumped off the screen—you couldn’t take your eyes off her, she was so attractive. The other actress just faded into the background of the scenes she was in. This is why they do screen tests. Mysterious things happen when you get people up there on the big screen.

  The other actress? It was Courteney Cox, who went on to great entertainment success, largely in television. The big screen tests you, and it was testing me with all the changes that were coming to our production methods.

  There is a term in motion picture making called the “China Girl.” In earlier days when movies were still shot in black-and-white, every batch of film negative that was sent to the lab for printing had a reference frame or two attached of a white porcelain figure that resembled a lady’s head. It was called a China Girl not because she was Chinese, but because the sculpted head was made out of a kind of china and it was in the form of a girl. The China Girl usually lay on a piece of black velvet, the two together displaying both pure white and absolute black, allowing cinematographers to easily judge the contrast quality of their prints. This image always represented for me the craft that was at the base of what we were doing. Later, it was a few frames of a female model’s face shot in color that was called a “Girl Head.” If the laboratory screwed up the color in printing from the negatives, it would be easy to see because cameramen had the control Girl Head back at the studio to compare it with.

  This sort of Norman Rockwell view of filmmaking as a craft had been evident in the artwork I had seen at the Ranch. Now the world of model makers building rocket ships and “powder men” blowing them up was dying. The craft world itself was blowing up. By about 1987, movie production had changed with the advent of digital. The first sign of this was when it became possible to scan a film into a digital format, manipulate it in a computer, and scan it out again to film for theatrical projection. This simple technical feat would revolutionize filmmaking. The China Girl and Girl Head were replaced with the image of a gray square that could be read by a densitometer.

  It took five to seven years to complete, but by the release of Jurassic Park in 1993, the transition was well on its way, and a film-based industry that was about a hundred years old started to collapse. Even the venerable Kodak itself would soon collapse.

  Nothing quite like this had ever happened before, but the audience didn’t notice and Hollywood didn’t yet see the implications. They didn’t realize that the creatures in Jurassic Park were essentially ones and zeros and that the movie business had changed forever.

  Even the introduction of sound back in 1929 cannot compare with what would eventually happen to the world of motion pictures. It was painful and it turned employees’ lives upside down, even forcing Oscar-winning workers into an early retirement. Yet, in my view, it was all positive.

  Film to me has always been a business, a craft, and an art, in that order. While it aspires to produce art and often does, it is a business at its core. It takes a lot of investment capital to make a Hollywood film. I recently read an interview with a studio head who said, “There are not a lot of entities in the world that can throw $200 million into a movie project, but we can. That is our competitive advantage.”

  Hollywood has always sought a competitive advantage. When television threatened it, the movies went to wide screen, or 3-D, or even R-rated. I remember when Francis Coppola invested in something called Smell-O-Vision!

  As the technology of the movie craft changes, so do the movies we make. The two are intimately bound together. Cinema follows a developmental path that straddles commerce and technology. It always has. When sound came in, it changed movies––their art was now a completely different art. The high art reached in the great silent films was gone. No one wanted to make or see new silent films anymore, no matter how great. So much for the art. Changing technology has always ruled this art form.

  The invention of the typewriter didn’t fundamentally change writing from the days of the pencil, but the introduction of sound did change movies. I would argue that the introduction of digital changed movies again like never before.

  Digital cinema makes possible nonexistent, but realistic-looking, worlds. This is opposed to the film camera, which records the real world. The camera simply captures data that can be read back in a controlled way. The images are sequenced on a strip of celluloid, controlled by a sprocket drive and a motor. It is essentially a storage medium with a display, yet it is nonlinear. Images can be rearranged at any point in the time sequence of the stored data of film. We called this “film editing,” and for years that was how I made my living.

  Historically, the very first projected images were lantern slides painted by artists. Now we are returning to the artists’ controlling the images with their hands. They are once again painting in movies, except this time it is from a digital paint box. How ironic that this technology should return us to our beginnings with moving images. Yet, “those wonderful people out there in the dark,” as Norma Desmond referred to them, they haven’t changed. They still want the emotional stories that I saw depicted above the fireplace at the Ranch in Peach Crop.

  The Distraction

  When it came time to restore the original Star Wars and rerelease it (1997), George called a few people together in the Building C theater and we screened his personal print. Traditionally only one or two prints like George’s would be made off the original negative of any major movie. The first was called the “answer” print. People called “timers” would grade the brightness and color quality, making corrections based on tests and experience, and get their “answer” with this first print. This was also the first time picture and sound were married on one strip of film ready for projection.

  The director and cinematographer would watch this print and make whatever additional corrections they wanted. If this was deemed good, the second answer print would be kept as theoretically the best and most original example of the movie. It would certainly be the sharpest, as it was made directly off the original camera negative. Many duplicate negatives would now be made off the original for mass printings that would reach theaters around the world.

  As the film rolled in theater C, George made comments on the scenes he wanted to fix or, in some cases, add. From his perspective, these changes were all based on what he wanted to do in the first place but had either run out of time, technology, or money on the first go-round. Now that he had all three at his disposal, he wanted to get it exactly as he originally envisioned it.

  One of the things very few directors ever got to do was make preservation masters of their films after they were completed, as it was expensive and no one wanted to pay for it, least of all the studio. But some people had enough clout and they got it done. The original negatives were protected because they were really only used to make dupe negatives, and those dupes are the ones that take the abuse. But there was another problem: The original negatives are subject to color fading and physical shrinkage over long periods of time.

  Star Wars was an important film and a valuable studio property, so it got the full treatment with a process called “separation masters.” Three black-and-white copies of the original negative are made, each filtered for either red, green, or blue. Since black-and-white film is essentially inert, unlike color film, which remains chemically active and subject to deterioration, long-term storage of these three strips were to provide a measure of protection, especially since they were going to be stored at the bottom of a salt mine in Nevada or somewhere.

  After George pointed out all of the shots he wanted fixed, h
e said something I have wondered about ever since. He said that he was going to do a comedy version of Star Wars. It’s been years since that day and it hasn’t happened yet, but remember, you heard it here first!

  When I got back to my office, I wrote George an e-mail saying that I thought a film should be made that documented all the people that worked on the original movie. They were all still alive, and many of them still worked for him. Surely they had great stories that shouldn’t be lost forever. I reminded him that he had seen the documentary I made on the making of Jurassic Park and that he liked it well enough to call up my boss and tell him so. The next day my phone rang and it was George’s attorney. He told me that George liked my idea and that he, Howard Rothman, would be in charge of the project. I never heard from him again.

  About a month later I wrote George again and said that I guessed no one except he and I were interested in doing this project. In a few days I got a call from Lynn Hale, the head of publicity, informing me that there was going to be a documentary, but that it would be handled by the studio. I have never seen it.

  Recently, I talked to my friend and fellow editor Tom Christopher, who George had hired to handle all the film and lab details of what he wanted done to the original Star Wars. Tom said he remembered my letter coming in because George’s longtime producer Rick McCallum wanted to know, “Who the hell is this guy?”