Inside the Star Wars Empire

by Bill Kimberlin

  I had thought a lot about this proposed Letterman Digital Arts Center and I was strongly in favor of it because I thought it made perfect sense both historically and for the future of San Francisco. I told one of the Presidio neighbors that I didn’t have a dog in this fight, I just worked for the guy, but I thought people would be crazy to turn it down, especially if you consider the quality of workmanship Lucas is known for. He was proposing an underground parking garage for all employee vehicles and had hired the foremost landscape architect in the country, Lawrence Halprin, to design a park with a creek spilling into a beautiful pond to cover the garage. Plus, this would be open to the public. Mothers with baby carriages and young children will be strolling here for decades to come.

  In order to speak to the center’s historical importance, I wrote a paper on the subject and sent it to the screenwriter for the film project, Matthew Robbins, an old friend of George’s. The final documentary included at least some of my thoughts, and eventually the plan to build the Letterman Digital Arts Center was approved.

  Today, San Francisco is awash with a tidal wave of digital success as new ventures are introduced weekly.

  The Stone Age Institute

  Security at ILM was always high for several reasons. One was to keep out the curious fans who were sometimes determined to find souvenirs or meet movie stars who were occasionally there. The biggest reason, however, was more industry protocol than anything else.

  We were always working on several movies at a time, and each Hollywood studio expected us to protect the privacy of their intellectual property in scripts and the proprietary techniques we were using on their projects. The last thing anyone wanted was for some director or producer to divulge at a cocktail party what he or she had seen of another person’s film. Since most film projects took well over a year to complete, there was a natural desire not to reveal spoilers about anyone’s upcoming release. Why endanger the surprise when it’s part of what the audience is looking for?

  Sometimes, however, if things were slow enough, I could get permission to bring a few people in and show them around. As my interest in paleoanthropology widened, I was invited to join the advisory board of the Stone Age Institute in Bloomington, Indiana. Funded largely by Gordon Getty, the son and heir of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, the institute fields anthropologists for worldwide expeditions to sites where early man lived, bringing back human skulls, skeletons, and tools for study and scholarly presentations. They were studying the family of man, and I was studying my family.

  So I took the founders of the institute, Nick Toth and Kathy Schick, along with its vice president, Henry Corning, who with Getty is the chief financial engineer for the institute, through ILM and then to the Ranch for lunch. It turned out that Henry was so impressed with the atmosphere at the Ranch that he organized the building of a similar country complex for their institute, which gave Nick and Kathy some independence from the University of Indiana and their own stature as more than just employee professors.

  The institute is now a multimillion-dollar complex on about forty acres of farmland outside Bloomington. It is a gorgeous compound built of Indiana limestone with a great hall that features, instead of the typical busts of Plato, Socrates, and other monumental intellectual leaders, all of the important skulls of our ancient ancestors such as Java Man, etc. When I first saw the new place, I remembered something Lucas had said after donating hundreds of millions of dollars to USC for a new film school building: “If you want a discipline to be taken seriously, you need a serious building.” The Stone Age Institute now had a serious building.

  Man is a toolmaker, and Nick invites all kinds of people who use tools in their craft to lecture and visit the institute, thus my invitation. Anthropologists learn about early man by studying his behavior and trying to reproduce his skills. The modern-day making of a stone tool is the ultimate learning experience. Nick showed me how to make what are called “hand axes” and gave me one. It’s funny but they look and fit the hand just like a computer mouse.

  The best examples for learning about early man are modern humans themselves. After all, as Phil Tippet, one of the geniuses behind Jurassic Park, taught me, existing animals are the best paleontological record we have of what the ancient ones might have been like. Since we are a type of animal ourselves, it makes sense to study ourselves in all our forms. Michel de Montaigne’s Essays famously record his study of himself. He wrote that he used “some traits of my character” to describe the traits of man, as in, “I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself.”

  This involvement with the institute began my limited but eventful introduction to Gordon Getty. Nick called me one day and asked if I could come to Bloomington again for a convocation they were having. I was torn as to whether I could spend the time away from my own work in starting my distribution business, but when he mentioned that Gordon was flying out in his private jet and that I would be welcome to join him, that cinched it.

  I can imagine no comparison in jet travel save possibly flying with a member of the Saudi royal family. Gordon and his wife had spent millions redesigning and redecorating this 727 airliner. They had chosen it because Gordon was six foot five and it was the only plane that he could stand up in comfortably. But it was not so much the luxury at play here as the simple comfort and convenience of having a personal plane of this type.

  All things considered, Gordon is a fairly modest man. Having engineered the sale of his family’s oil company in 1984 for $10 billion, he is well acquainted with extreme wealth. So much so that on having heard that Gordon had lost $50 million in a business venture, I asked Henry about it, since they were old friends going back to their Harvard days, and he said something I will never forget: “These things happen.” That type of thinking is so far from the average person’s experience, it reminds one of the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”4

  Well, this was a different way of travel. As I pulled up to the private plane terminal at Oakland International Airport, someone came and got my bags from the car. From there I walked out onto the tarmac and scurried up the rear steps of the 727 affectionately named “Jetty” by Gordon’s kids. Fore and aft were large areas with a few huge cushioned swivel chairs sprinkled about, the type you might find in an executive office except permanently attached to the floor. There were also some couches and huge video screens showing our flight path with animation as well as weather data. These screens, fore and aft, were also used to play in-flight movies or television shows. In the center of the plane was Gordon’s bedroom, with a huge double bed and private bath. The kitchen was next to this towards the front of the plane.

  There was a crew of five: captain, copilot, navigator, and two stewardesses. Breakfast featured fresh fruit, all kinds of juices and coffees, and the choice of two kinds of omelets. Unlike commercial flights, there was no security check and the door to the cockpit remained open, which meant I could talk to the pilot. I asked him if this was a dream job, and he said that the best thing for him was that while the plane had all the fancy autopilot stuff, you could still fly it manually, and because of its low weight due to so few passengers (one time it was just four people), it was a real hot rod. I can attest to this, as takeoffs were at a very sharp angle up.

  I asked one of the crew where I should sit, as Gordon’s limo hadn’t arrived yet. “Anywhere but that chair,” he said, pointing to one of the big swivels. “That’s Mr. G’s chair.” So I sat on a couch. When Gordon arrived, he introduced himself while the crew slammed the interior cabinet doors. He never did sit in “that chair,” but there was no time to ponder it, as we were almost immediately airborne. Very efficient.

  Gordon was deep into writing on a yellow legal-size pad, so I poked around, noting every major newspaper and magazine either neatly folded or displayed for use. When we landed at the regional airport in Bloomington, I was told our plane was
the largest one to ever land there.

  Gordon may be a billionaire but he dresses like a college professor, with a saggy sport jacket, cheap wristwatch, and old wallet, all of which he laughs about. If it was about convenience or art he was interested, but petty jewelry or trinkets like cars are of little use to him. For years he drove an AMC Pacer and still talks about it fondly.

  When the conference was over, I flew with Gordon to New York, where I had planned my own vacation before flying back home on a commercial flight. Landing at a private airport in New Jersey, we were still the largest plane by far. Gordon’s jetliner dwarfed the puny little Learjets and Gulfstreams that all the Wall Street hotshots had squeezed into.

  I hitched a ride in Gordon’s limo to Manhattan, and he told me of his longtime desire to produce a movie of Wagner’s Ring but had been told it would cost a billion dollars. When he dropped me at my cheap New York hotel, I mentioned that I would be willing to produce The Ring for $600 million, tops. I’m not sure if he knew I was joking or not.

  I had now been turned back into a pumpkin and was no longer consorting with billionaires. Gordon was staying at New York’s Palace Hotel, and I was staying at The Pod. Mine was a wonderful European-style budget hotel, just not in league with New York’s finest.

  My wife met me in Manhattan and, after touring the city, I suggested we drop the return airline tickets we had planned on using and drive back in a rental car that we could leave in San Francisco. Neither of us had done a cross-country drive since just after college. I vowed to take back roads whenever possible and to not eat in any chain restaurants during the entire trip. It took a month, and we had a ball.

  * * *

  4. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy,” in All the Sad Young Men (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926).

  Dropping Dead

  The last line in the opening to Orson Welles’s masterpiece, Citizen Kane, is “Then last week, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane.” Mine came on a Friday afternoon in 2002. It was not like I wasn’t expecting it. They had just awarded me with a golden statue of the Star Wars character C-3PO to mark my twenty years. The first day of my employment, I had signed in with the receptionist, and when I walked past her, she said just loud enough for me to hear, “Day one.” It was now day 7,300 and counting.

  I was like the man who came to dinner—and never left. It was originally supposed to be about an eight-month gig, but the films just kept coming. I was the chief visual effects editor and was promoted to department head, which included our commercial division. Department heads traditionally didn’t last very long, but I lasted nine years, which was a record. I survived four management changes and numerous political battles, but when the digital revolution hit with full force, my age began to cripple me. The company pretty much split into film versus digital. This was about the time when George announced to no one in particular that “editing on film was like scratching on rocks.” I became a Neanderthal.

  Although I spent all day on an Avid digital editing machine, it didn’t matter. I had been using computers for writing since before hard drives; I had been on the Internet at home since about 1989 and had websites up in 1999. None of this mattered. I was “the old guy in editorial.” I became the union steward and Patty, the head of production, said apropos of nothing, “That won’t do you any good.” Allies disappeared. I asked to see my personnel file, and in it was a statement from Kim, a producer and sometimes friend, that said, “He is an old man and should probably retire.”

  Fortunately I had already started preparations to retire, once again following the advice of Montaigne, “Retire into yourself, but first prepare yourself to be your own host.” In December 1999 and January 2000 I had sold all the stock in my retirement account. This meant that I completely avoided the tech wreck that cost the equity markets a loss of $5 trillion.

  There is a Hollywood tale that Harry Cohn once ordered the writer of Citizen Kane, Herman J. Mankiewicz, off the Columbia studio lot, ending his tirade with “and don’t bring him back ever . . . unless we need him.” On Friday, August 2, 2002, I walked out the door. I was back on the following Monday, because they needed me. But it was a brief reprieve, and I had decided to retire anyway. Still, it was a shock. I had worked for over thirty years—was I ready for this?

  In 1919 Jess Willard, who had defeated Jack Johnson in Havana, Cuba, fought the much-feared Jack Dempsey to defend his heavyweight title. Dempsey knocked Willard down seven times in the first round, going on to win in round four when Willard could not continue. Someone later asked Willard what he was thinking as he was being knocked down so many times and he replied, “I kept saying to myself, I have $100,000 and a ranch in Kansas, I have $100,000 and a ranch in Kansas.” Was there something I could say to myself? I did have a small ranch in the wine country besides my home in Berkeley. So I told myself that since I knew who I was now, I could have a life rich in writing, real estate investing, and distributing my own movies.

  I love the city with its cafes and bookstores, but I also need to be in nature every so often. I find the contrast in going from one to the other immensely refreshing. Each in its own way rejuvenates my spirits, and I feel fortunate to have this option.

  I bought the country place as a retreat from my high-stress job and city life in general. It is on a small hill overlooking what has become a wine region. The property contains a Sea Ranch–style house built out of clear heart redwood, a separate studio building, and a small cottage-like structure with its own deck that I use for writing. There are also lots of acres to roam around on. I can run my small businesses from there or the city, but I also try to have fun wherever I am.

  Most of my friends who had also left Lucasfilm trotted off to other jobs, both in and out of the film business. I didn’t feel the need anymore. I was finally ready for my close-up.

  Oddly enough, one of the things I did after I retired was buy a slot machine. If there is a more clear parallel to the gambles so familiar to the moviemaker, I don’t know what it would be. It’s like a horoscope for real, but with no phony promises. You know you cannot win, only delay the inevitable. It’s a gentle reminder of the idiot’s tale we are all involved in.

  Mine is one of those old-style quarter machines with a $150 jackpot. It came out of Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in Reno, Nevada, and is of about a 1958 vintage. I think I got it just because I could never play one when my mother occasionally took us to Reno as kids. The casinos were fascinating to me back then. Not only were there rooms full of gambling devices with bells ringing and coins crashing into payout bins, but there were also memorable displays. One casino had a museum-like room lined with artifacts from the Old West, like antique rifles, pistols, and derringers, just like I saw in the movies and on television. Another had a large glass case with a million dollars in cash on display. Cowboys and money—it doesn’t get any better than that for a kid raised on Westerns.

  Personally, I can’t understand why anyone would want to play the new slots that have no coins and only pay out a little slip of paper. What fun is that? Even hitting a small jackpot on mine brings a neurotransmitter cocktail of pleasure to your brain, with its crash of quarters clanging into the metal tray. That sound, like a great movie moment, was carefully designed to pick up your spirits so you would play again.

  Here I am, unemployed for the first time in thirty-two years, and I buy a slot machine. But that wasn’t all. I bought a 1947 Lionel train set exactly like the one I lost in the chaos after my mother’s death. I, like a lot of people, have a somewhat romanticized view of life. Yet, what is more appropriate? Does anyone really desire the real version? At my small ranch, my aunt’s old summer resort and grandpa’s booze truck, the REO Speed Wagon, are still within six miles of me. They say you can’t go home again. Well, we shall see about that.

  After buying the slot, I took it to a guy in San Mateo, south of San Francisco, for a tune-up. Steve Squir
es had been working on slot machines since he was seventeen years old, and he was then seventy-six.

  This guy was amazing, and his shop was filled with antique slot machines. They were everywhere, covering almost every square foot of floor space to the extent that only footpaths were left open for navigation. The walls were hung with old slot machine faceplates like mine, from every brand and year imaginable. From the ceiling hung hundreds of old slot wheels, each with varying combinations of cherries, oranges, and plums brightly printed on them. There was room after room filled with boxes, drawers, and shelves, all overflowing with antique parts. Steve told me that Lucasfilm had once asked him to rig a slot machine for a movie so that every time the handle was pulled, there would be a jackpot. That would save a lot of time in shooting a scene. He couldn’t remember the movie, and my best guess was Tucker: The Man and His Dream.

  One thing I always wondered about was how they set the odds on a slot. I asked Steve and he said, “You can’t do it mechanically, which is what everyone thinks. You have to change the order and frequency of the cherries and other fruit images that appear on a given reel.” It turns out that three-reel machines have about 8,000 possible combinations of images that might appear on the payline. Alter the makeup of the reels, and you change the odds. A machine like mine could potentially earn the casino about $800 a day. A hundred working machines could pay for a lot of casino overhead back in the 1950s. The jackpot, too, was a decent payout when you consider you could buy a used car for $150 back then.

  I think of my 25-cent machine as representative of the movie world’s resistance to change. I don’t want to play the new electronic slots, and Thomas Edison originally didn’t want to project his images. He preferred to sell his Kinetoscopes for private viewing in commercial parlors, which charged 25 cents to watch a few film clips. “If we put out a screen machine [projector],” he said, “there will be a use for maybe about ten of them in the whole United States. Let’s not kill the goose that lays the golden egg.” My old 25-cent machine is still an un-killed goose. Edison didn’t want to give up those quarters, and I don’t want to submit to the electronic when the mechanical is more fun. I sometimes complain about the lack of technological progress in the world yet sometimes celebrate it, and I’m not alone. We all edit our lives to some extent. We pick and choose. Many people who drive modern cars and use the latest cellphones still want to live in Victorian houses.