There seemed to be tremendous attention to detail… without anyone ever stepping back and looking at the whole picture. Would you say that was accurate? Was that part of the culture there?
Were there a lot of barriers/secrecy between departments? I think of how Apple is supposed to be run, with each of the little departments almost completely unaware of what the next dept. over is doing, and employees never talking about their actual work, as if they were CIA operatives. (If so, I can see that contributing to the big-picture fail; it would mean that very few people were ever even ABLE to see the big picture at once, much less evaluate it.)
In the prequels, Lucas tended to conduct principal photography and then months later go back a reshoot a whole lot more. The secret history of StarWars called it “shoot, edit,shoot,edit…”. How was this received? Not well I imagine. any idea why this was done?
Have you seen the Mr. Plinkett reviews of Eps 1,2, and 3? What did you think of them? Especially their criticisms of “GWL” as a director.
Youtube search “RedLetterMedia” and/or Plinkett review Star Wars" if you have not seen them, they are pretty well known, exhaustive and generally pretty negative.
I’m wondering if some of the questions here are way too specific and, forgive me if I’m wrong, expect more involvement in major projects than you may have had. I’ll go more vague. Including mine, mind you.
What were your biggest accomplishments there?
What was the vibe working there? Pretty cool or “just work” like most places?
Moving the Ranch would be not only stupid, but prohibitively expensive and logistically demanding. And that doesn’t include the Presidio, where most of the studio (employees, hardware) actually work now. No, they have an important presence here in the Bay Area film community and they won’t be leaving.
But the org chart will certainly change. The announcement of Kathleen Kennedy as the new creative head of the company was surely made with this transition of ownership in mind (this is all conjecture, since I left before any of it happened, but very likely). But as far as creative freedom goes, that remains to be seen. Before, there was no LFL stock, no board of directors. It was just One Guy. So everything that happened (or didn’t) was all at his personal whim and initiative. So while he cared about money (since it was all his), he didn’t have the same commitment to bottom-line figures that a typical studio would.
I figure the most immediate difference will be that Disney will slowly-but-surely expand the production slate. While I was there, aside from DVD re-releases, the only “new” product that came down the pipe was a film every few years (SW2-3, Indy 4) and the animated series. All largely franchise-dependent (Red Tails was in the pipeline when I left). I suspect that while that’s a golden goose they won’t want to kill, they will recognize the need to broaden their scope of content to diversify their audience and make the studio less reliant on that one thing.
The other obvious difference is that all Disney production companies will now have a top-of-the-line visual effects house (ILM), audio recording and mixing house (Sky Sound) and research library (GWL bought the enormous research libraries of Universal and Paramount studios) at their disposal. In some cases, this will be paying out of one pocket to line another and won’t affect work practice (Pixar, for example, already did all their mixing at Sky Sound), but it also means that any push to expand clients for those contract sub-companies will have a more stable slate of content (film & TV) to fall back on now.
Again, mostly guessing, but seems pretty logical to me.
No idea. I was part of the discussion about whether there would be anything special done for that film’s 20th anniversary (in the end, there wasn’t). I suspect that, like other non-franchise titles (Tucker, Howard, Radioland Murders), it is acknowledged that there is a much more narrow potential audience for those films, and while Willow probably has the most fans of the four, high-def transfers for Blu-Ray are still expensive and time consuming (not to mention if there is any commitment to “extras”). Best guess is…eventually.
There is obviously an enormous amount of secrecy with any familiar Lucasfilm property, simply because the fear of piracy is so high and the demand for any scrap of info is so expansive worldwide. So sometimes, things definitely transpired on a need-to-know basis, not because of territorialism or paranoia, but just because of practical realities about the media landscape. This often meant talking to colleagues at the dining facility and both sides speaking in broad strokes because of their respective work assignments. This was perfectly natural–and usually, once something was made public, you could easily retrace those conversations to realize in retrospect that it was Harry Potter 5 or Transformers or whatever that was taking so much of their time.
The first part of your question has more to do with creative distance and objectivity–something that any film will have challenges with, big or small. The biggest difference was that while budgets were made and closely monitored, if there was something in a SW film that GWL wanted, money was not really a barrier (even if it was still vigorously negotiated) the way it might be at other studios.
I did spend one day on a green screen stage in costume to appear as an extra in the recent Star Tours upgrade (again, the Disney relationship). This did involve wearing an original costume from Ep.6. I have seen the raw footage and am clearly visible and recognizable (this is confirmed from several friends who rode the ride and saw me), but I have not been on the ride myself yet, and if you watch the YouTube that someone recorded surreptitiously, I only appear as a blur because the ride requires 3D glasses.
No, I haven’t, but I did see some of the stills so did see the THX/guard joke.
The Ranch has a fire crew (and engine) on staff who, when on shift, live onsite. This is staffed 24/7, 365 days/week. They are all trained CMTs as well, but their most visible job is the security duties at the front gate and on the grounds. Except for the “Skywalker Ranch” logo on the side of the engine, there are no other signs or visual indicators anywhere on the entire property outside that would suggest that you are anywhere other than a normal ranch. There is an organic garden, a stable full of animals, an operational vineyard, a lake, and cattle all over the countryside (and it is in the country). The only difference is that they make movies there.
I have never been inside GWL’s personal office. Even the area of the building it’s in is generally off-limits to employees unless they need to be there for some reason, but that’s actually not uncommon for other high-sensitive areas of that and other buildings, too.
Not to my knowledge, though I did have regular contact with the LFL employee whose sole job was to caretake the database that dealt with nothing but continuity issues in the entire EU. Because so much time had passed between Jedi and Phantom, there were inevitably things that would occur in the prequels that might contradict some previously published novel or comic book. His job was to track (and if possible, reconcile) all of it, down to the smallest technical manual or collectible card. Daunting.
I’m bummed to hear that Lucas sold the whole thing and is talking about retiring.
I’ve defended him any number of times, arguing that he’s only really directed three feature films - THX-1138, American Graffiti and the Star Wars saga. And that those first two films showed his ability as a director far better than the space operas. And up till recently, he had been talking about making deeply personal films, and I was looking forward to them.
I get the feeling the box office failure of Red Tails took a lot out of him.
This is one of those grey areas, where there’s enough I do know and enough I don’t with firsthand certainty for me to say.
But if there’s one cliche about the movie business that isn’t true, is that you can “just fix it in post”. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t, and sometimes you create a workflow that factors in a wide amount of wiggle room where reshoots are done out of pre-planning and not just necessity. Again, he had the $ and resources to indulge this non-traditional way of shooting films. Most studios wouldn’t (or can’t) do it that way.
The problem with any labor of love is that you lose all objectivity, it becomes such a personal thing. RT was the first LFL film in a decade I had to pay to see, and while many of the production problems were not a secret in the media, it was difficult for me to watch the film without keen awareness of everything I’d heard about the show building up to its release (at work and off). And as bad as the prequels are, that film is worse. Truly terrible.
I agree on the earlier films. THX is provocative scifi–not perfect, but full of interesting ideas, well-rendered on a budget. It’s also unapologetically adult–the only one of his films you can say that about. Graffiti is great fun, has a terrific sense of period and is expertly assembled with such a loose, free-wheeling structure. But critic David Thomson assessed it perfectly in calling it “drunk on Coke”, and it is a window into the long-term adolescence the rest of his career represents (even RT reeks of one-dimensional hero worship and isn’t even as good as the so-so TV movie about the Tuskegee airmen that was made a decade earlier).
We had, of course, heard for years that he wanted to make smaller, more personal, experimental films. The prospect of this was genuinely exciting, and was a potential mirror to the career of his mentor, Francis Coppola, who was similarly trying to create some creative separation from a very popular trilogy by trying new, modestly-sized, challenging projects. Not all those films have been successful, but they’ve always been interesting. But with GWL, none of it ever happened.
I won’t count the Star Tours example, which has already been mentioned, not some specific things that the NDA won’t allow me to say.
(*) GWL was the Grand Marshal for the Rose Parade in 2007. That meant that in addition to having a nation-wide search for the top 501st legion members to march as a full costumed squadron in the parade, they also had two large floats (one of Endor, one of Naboo) to send down the route. I was on the second-to-last crew in decorating the floats 12/31 (essentially, the crew that does the last detailing of ivy, beans, herbs, etc. as well as prepping the flowers; the last crew actually installs the flowers the night of the 31st/morning of the 1st)
This was one of the most fun things I’ve done, period. We were in the same hangar as the two floats of the Rose Bowl teams, so it was a strange mix of elderly alumni of those schools, local high schoolers tasked to volunteer, and some of us Star Wars-types. The energy of assembling these floats up close was amazing, and I still remember being up on two-and-a-half-story-high scaffolding gluing one bean after another after another to create all the little detailing to capture the effect. This was not my first exposure to the parade (I’ve camped out overnight, reserved bleachers, and marched in it), but this was easily my favorite and one I’d eagerly do again.
(*) People may not realize this, but Skywalker Ranch is one of the most popular destinations for Make-a-Wish kids. There are lots of dignitaries and movie stars that visit the Ranch, but whenever you saw a limo onsite, you knew it was probably a MaW family getting the full tour. I don’t know everything about what happens on a typical visit, but I did participate as a “guide” for some of the families and there’s nothing quite unbearably sad and heart-warming as seeing this terminal kid with his parents (and usually siblings) so excited about seeing a Boba Fett helmet up close or eating in the same facility that GWL eats. That never got old.
