May 5, 2024 • 15 mins
Guest host Rich Berra and Hollywood special effects expert Bill Kimberlin discuss working with George Lucas on Star Wars at the legendary filmmaker's secluded Skywalker Ranch.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Bill, I want to talk to you about Skywalker Ranch
because it's not in Hollywood, it's in northern California. You're
making movies away from the Hollywood scene and on Skywalker Ranch,
which I imagine is both freeing and maybe you feel
like you're a bit of a bit of a bit
cotton inside a place that you can't leave while you're
working on a movie too, Is that right?
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Yeah? Well, I used to go out there for lunch
a lot because it's such a beautiful place and it
has We were out there when I first started in
May of eighty two. It was Georgia's birthday a few
days later. His birthday is on the fourteenth, and I
(00:50):
started on the tenth. And so during daili's which were
all the backgrounds run from up and Humble for the
bike in Jedi, they had shot a scene where the
e walks run out with a big banner that says
(01:10):
happy birthday, George, and George kept saying, you know, make
sure that's in Daily tonight at home, because he re
ran everything at home for his wife, Marcia, who was
his main editor. Famously helped a lot on his movies.
(01:31):
She had cut Taxi Driver. She was really well known as.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Old Yeah she's she's in the movies. So when you're
saying that she edited Taxi Driver the movie, yes, okay.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Yeah so she I mean she was amazed. Well he was,
you know, trying to write screenplays and broke and you
know she was out there bringing in you know, the
vacant uh So the thing about well, there was one
other thing I wanted to mention about you and your
(02:04):
kids being so into Star Wars when George came down
from Skywalker Ranch and he came to our studio and
he brought his personal print of Star Wars, printed off
the original a negative, the only one in the world,
and he ran it for us and told us the
changes that he wanted to make. I remember going back
to my editing room and thinking, what kids want to
(02:26):
see something that their parents liked or their grandparents liked.
I mean, I don't know that kids today want to
listen to the Beatles. So I was a little skeptical.
But because all those movies had been on videotape, and
every time I did a house tour looking for some
real estate, the kid's bedrooms were plastered with this stuff.
(02:51):
I began to realize, no, this is going to work,
and all studio executives were totally against it. They said,
are not in the restoration business. We're not doing this,
and they tried to stop him. And if he didn't
own the company, that would have been his last week,
you know, really he would have been gone because they
(03:13):
didn't want to do that. But in the end, those films,
the restorations of the three films, grossed two hundred and
fifty million dollars, which paid for a lot of the
new films, the Phantom Menace and stuff.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Now I heard something about that too. Is it true
that was he that far ahead of the game when
he made the first three movies which started as you know,
episode four, that he just knew the technology was coming
in another twenty years where he could do the Phantom
Menace and all that.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
He didn't know. The fact I was chosen to I
ran effects editorial. I was an editor, and then they
made me the manager of it, and that also included
we had a commercial division that made that edited the
TV commercials, and so I was chosen to take George
on a tour of the company to show him. He'd been,
(04:11):
you know, on vacation for a while, and he wanted
to see what we were up to, you know, what
the new things we were doing. And so I took
him around. When we got to the CMX room, which
is a post production machine back in the day where
you did all the compositing for TV commercials and all
(04:34):
the things that you could do, he said to me,
how is this different from my edit droid? He had
no idea. So a guy that I worked for went
then and worked for George on the Young Indiana Jones series,
and that's guy's name was Edgar Berkson. He schooled George
(04:57):
in what was possible. In other words, George didn't know
about what to be done in all this post production
video stuff, or what he did know was kind of vague,
and Edgar schooled him. And I believe that that's what
got George so hot to try and do it when
(05:18):
digital started to become available. And that's a little off
the topic of Skywalker Ranch, but I wanted to I
wanted to mention that.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
I'm a little ADHD. Sorry, Bill, thanks for bringing home
yes back to Skywalker Ridge.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Yeah, So Skywalker Ranch is a five thousand acre ranch,
very beautifully laid out. It's got vineyards, it's got a
really first class restaurant, a big building that George called
his office. When we saw it going up, we said, what, George,
what is that we're there? He said, it's going to
(05:57):
be my office, a five thousand are It looks like
a hotel. And then he wanted to attract directors because directors,
they're away from home a lot, and they don't get
to see their family and their kids and stuff. And
then when they come back to La then they're working
down at the studio and the post production and that's
(06:20):
not all that family friendly either. So George had the idea, well,
I'm going to build some really fancy condominiums and then
there's going to be a baseball diamond. Then there's going
to be horses, and there's going to be all this stuff.
So the directors could bring their families, and the families
can stay during the day while he's working on mixing
(06:44):
his film, but they have things to do and then
he'll see him in the evening. And to a certain extent,
that worked. But the ranch is quite a long ways
out from San Francisco, and I know that some of
the directors thought, this is very nice, but I'm never
coming out here again. I felt like if you worked there,
(07:08):
it was like, you know, you were in a golden bubble,
but it was difficult to leave and have lunch and
come back. You ate up a whole hour getting to
somewhere where you could have lunch. So of course there
were restaurants at Skywalker Ranch, and so you could just
stay there for the rest of your life. You know.
(07:29):
I stayed there after the San Francisco earthquake because it
was afraid they shut down the Bay Bridge, and I
was afraid they were going to shut down the Richmond
saner Fel Bridge and I wouldn't be able to get
to work, and so they put me up out there
and it was, you know, it was pretty cool, very
nice digs.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
It kind of reminds me of it sounds like the
area fifty one of movies where and I imagine.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Like Hurst Castle.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Okay, but I imagine that at some point. Of course, now
the internet's full of rumors. It's almost like you can't
keep a plot secret for anything. But back in the day,
were there people going through Skywalker Ranch trash looking for
evidence of what the next you know, George Lucas.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
More car trash. It was it was so ILM in
stands for Industrial, Light and Magic. But if you look
on a real estate map and you look at the zoning,
our area would be zoned light Industrial. All George had
(08:30):
to do was add the word magic and he had
the name of the company and it was the same.
In Los Angeles where the original ILM was, it was
then the light industrial district where you could do this
kind of stuff. So the kids after school would come
and go through the dumpsters because like the model shop
(08:52):
would just throw out stuff. And one day we chased
some of them down and one little guy was the
only guy who didn't ride off fast enough and he said,
I didn't get anything, and we felt sorry for him,
so we gave them this incredible tour of the company,
(09:12):
the model shop and all this stuff. And that's when
I learned. One day on a Saturday, this telephone repairman
guy came in and he had his children with him,
and I said to him, can I take them and
go show him Darth Vader and c Threepo And he
said yeah, yeah, So so I took the kids in
(09:34):
to see them, and this was before these things were
in every video store. I mean you nobody got to
see these things in person, but I realized they were.
They were kind of impressed, but they weren't bowled over
because without James Harld joins his voice and the lighting
(09:56):
lit up right, it is a little strange. So that
impressed me as to how important the dramatic setting has
to be to make the magic work.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Well.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Tie this in a little bit for me, so as
a musician and a guy who's played in studios and
on songs before, there's a fatigue moment. I think when
you listen to songs and maybe you've heard them so
many times as you're trying to get it ready for
wherever it's going to go, that maybe even stop hearing
the song the way it actually is on the track,
and you're hearing things that you've maybe you thought were there.
(10:30):
When you look at an effect or a scene over
and over and over, do you see something maybe isn't
even there, or do you see it so much that
you can't actually see what the people who are going
to see the movie see? How do you patrol me?
Speaker 3 (10:44):
I went to the eye doctor once and so did
my friend, and after he took the I test. He said,
what the hell do you do for a living? You know,
because it was like off the chart. And I said,
while I'd sit in these dark screening rooms that I
watched film all day looking for errors, and we would
run them back and forth. We had special projectors that
(11:05):
would let us rock and roll them, and then we
would sometimes loop them. We had a series of rollers,
and we could just watch it in a loop again
and again and again. And then after we had watched
it so many times that we're a little dizzy, we
would flop it in the projector and watch it flopped.
(11:26):
And this is what they teach bank tellers back in
the old day, how to spot forgery names turned the
signature upside down because you see it in a different way.
And so we had all these little tricks to refresh
our eyes. But about hearing something again and again and again,
(11:48):
I must have heard many boffins died to bring you
this information. We must have heard that in a thousand times.
So we would make jokes about it. We would go
out and get the hamburger for somebody who was working
and couldn't leave, and we'd bring it back because of
the traffic and everything we would say. Then he often's
died to bring you this hamburger. And I don't think
(12:11):
George appreciated us making fun of them.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Yeah, you know, but after you hear it so much,
it's part of your world, it's part of your.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
Brain, right, Yeah, exactly, And so you have to staying
fresh in evaluating something when you've seen it so many times.
It's difficult. And I'll tell you something about Marcia Lucas.
She's one of the only people that I've ever met
who's not only a brilliant editor, but she can look
(12:39):
at your movie tell you what's wrong with it and
how to fix it. So when she first saw Spielberg
ran for his buddies, George, Marcia the screenwriter buddies greatress
was lost arc at the end, she stood up and
she said, Stephen, there's no emotion resolution. We don't know
(13:02):
what happened to India and the girl and you know,
spill work like slapped his forehead and said, you're right.
How did I forget that? So he went out and
shot the ending where they meet on the steps of
the city hall in San Francisco. They have a little
(13:23):
conversation and that is satisfied that you know they're going
to see each other again or however, I don't even remember,
but she spotted it and she said, this is what
you need to do to fix it. And that's golden.
You can't buy that.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Yeah, that makes it come together. What a great mind
that is. And you know what, of course we're dudes.
We're thinking about the adventure and she's thinking about well,
I care about the relationship as well, and that's what
makes it mass appeal.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
That's right, exactly, And so we were all really disappointed
when the two of them separated. They literally the attorneys
and the accountants came through and counted everything in the company.
They went through my editing bench and wrote down everything
(14:10):
on my editing bench and added it all up. It
came to a hundred million dollars. He gave her fifty
and he sold the company to Disney many years later
for four point zero five billion dollars. That was the
(14:33):
best investment he ever made in his life. For fifty
million dollars, he got four billion back.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
I think you could upgrade that office at Skywalker Ranch
at that point.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Well, there's a.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Joke that the that the stage chance used to say
is after Empire strikes back, and they said, we knew
that it had been successful because we saw that George
bought new tires for his Camaro.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
To more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one
a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Bill, I want to talk to you about Skywalker Ranch
because it's not in Hollywood, it's in northern California. You're
making movies away from the Hollywood scene and on Skywalker Ranch,
which I imagine is both freeing and maybe you feel
like you're a bit of a bit of a bit
cotton inside a place that you can't leave while you're
working on a movie too, Is that right?
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Yeah? Well, I used to go out there for lunch
a lot because it's such a beautiful place and it
has We were out there when I first started in
May of eighty two. It was Georgia's birthday a few
days later. His birthday is on the fourteenth, and I
(00:50):
started on the tenth. And so during daili's which were
all the backgrounds run from up and Humble for the
bike in Jedi, they had shot a scene where the
e walks run out with a big banner that says
(01:10):
happy birthday, George, and George kept saying, you know, make
sure that's in Daily tonight at home, because he re
ran everything at home for his wife, Marcia, who was
his main editor. Famously helped a lot on his movies.
(01:31):
She had cut Taxi Driver. She was really well known as.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Old Yeah she's she's in the movies. So when you're
saying that she edited Taxi Driver the movie, yes, okay.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Yeah so she I mean she was amazed. Well he was,
you know, trying to write screenplays and broke and you
know she was out there bringing in you know, the
vacant uh So the thing about well, there was one
other thing I wanted to mention about you and your
(02:04):
kids being so into Star Wars when George came down
from Skywalker Ranch and he came to our studio and
he brought his personal print of Star Wars, printed off
the original a negative, the only one in the world,
and he ran it for us and told us the
changes that he wanted to make. I remember going back
to my editing room and thinking, what kids want to
(02:26):
see something that their parents liked or their grandparents liked.
I mean, I don't know that kids today want to
listen to the Beatles. So I was a little skeptical.
But because all those movies had been on videotape, and
every time I did a house tour looking for some
real estate, the kid's bedrooms were plastered with this stuff.
(02:51):
I began to realize, no, this is going to work,
and all studio executives were totally against it. They said,
are not in the restoration business. We're not doing this,
and they tried to stop him. And if he didn't
own the company, that would have been his last week,
you know, really he would have been gone because they
(03:13):
didn't want to do that. But in the end, those films,
the restorations of the three films, grossed two hundred and
fifty million dollars, which paid for a lot of the
new films, the Phantom Menace and stuff.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Now I heard something about that too. Is it true
that was he that far ahead of the game when
he made the first three movies which started as you know,
episode four, that he just knew the technology was coming
in another twenty years where he could do the Phantom
Menace and all that.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
He didn't know. The fact I was chosen to I
ran effects editorial. I was an editor, and then they
made me the manager of it, and that also included
we had a commercial division that made that edited the
TV commercials, and so I was chosen to take George
on a tour of the company to show him. He'd been,
(04:11):
you know, on vacation for a while, and he wanted
to see what we were up to, you know, what
the new things we were doing. And so I took
him around. When we got to the CMX room, which
is a post production machine back in the day where
you did all the compositing for TV commercials and all
(04:34):
the things that you could do, he said to me,
how is this different from my edit droid? He had
no idea. So a guy that I worked for went
then and worked for George on the Young Indiana Jones series,
and that's guy's name was Edgar Berkson. He schooled George
(04:57):
in what was possible. In other words, George didn't know
about what to be done in all this post production
video stuff, or what he did know was kind of vague,
and Edgar schooled him. And I believe that that's what
got George so hot to try and do it when
(05:18):
digital started to become available. And that's a little off
the topic of Skywalker Ranch, but I wanted to I
wanted to mention that.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
I'm a little ADHD. Sorry, Bill, thanks for bringing home
yes back to Skywalker Ridge.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Yeah, So Skywalker Ranch is a five thousand acre ranch,
very beautifully laid out. It's got vineyards, it's got a
really first class restaurant, a big building that George called
his office. When we saw it going up, we said, what, George,
what is that we're there? He said, it's going to
(05:57):
be my office, a five thousand are It looks like
a hotel. And then he wanted to attract directors because directors,
they're away from home a lot, and they don't get
to see their family and their kids and stuff. And
then when they come back to La then they're working
down at the studio and the post production and that's
(06:20):
not all that family friendly either. So George had the idea, well,
I'm going to build some really fancy condominiums and then
there's going to be a baseball diamond. Then there's going
to be horses, and there's going to be all this stuff.
So the directors could bring their families, and the families
can stay during the day while he's working on mixing
(06:44):
his film, but they have things to do and then
he'll see him in the evening. And to a certain extent,
that worked. But the ranch is quite a long ways
out from San Francisco, and I know that some of
the directors thought, this is very nice, but I'm never
coming out here again. I felt like if you worked there,
(07:08):
it was like, you know, you were in a golden bubble,
but it was difficult to leave and have lunch and
come back. You ate up a whole hour getting to
somewhere where you could have lunch. So of course there
were restaurants at Skywalker Ranch, and so you could just
stay there for the rest of your life. You know.
(07:29):
I stayed there after the San Francisco earthquake because it
was afraid they shut down the Bay Bridge, and I
was afraid they were going to shut down the Richmond
saner Fel Bridge and I wouldn't be able to get
to work, and so they put me up out there
and it was, you know, it was pretty cool, very
nice digs.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
It kind of reminds me of it sounds like the
area fifty one of movies where and I imagine.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Like Hurst Castle.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Okay, but I imagine that at some point. Of course, now
the internet's full of rumors. It's almost like you can't
keep a plot secret for anything. But back in the day,
were there people going through Skywalker Ranch trash looking for
evidence of what the next you know, George Lucas.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
More car trash. It was it was so ILM in
stands for Industrial, Light and Magic. But if you look
on a real estate map and you look at the zoning,
our area would be zoned light Industrial. All George had
(08:30):
to do was add the word magic and he had
the name of the company and it was the same.
In Los Angeles where the original ILM was, it was
then the light industrial district where you could do this
kind of stuff. So the kids after school would come
and go through the dumpsters because like the model shop
(08:52):
would just throw out stuff. And one day we chased
some of them down and one little guy was the
only guy who didn't ride off fast enough and he said,
I didn't get anything, and we felt sorry for him,
so we gave them this incredible tour of the company,
(09:12):
the model shop and all this stuff. And that's when
I learned. One day on a Saturday, this telephone repairman
guy came in and he had his children with him,
and I said to him, can I take them and
go show him Darth Vader and c Threepo And he
said yeah, yeah, So so I took the kids in
(09:34):
to see them, and this was before these things were
in every video store. I mean you nobody got to
see these things in person, but I realized they were.
They were kind of impressed, but they weren't bowled over
because without James Harld joins his voice and the lighting
(09:56):
lit up right, it is a little strange. So that
impressed me as to how important the dramatic setting has
to be to make the magic work.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Well.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Tie this in a little bit for me, so as
a musician and a guy who's played in studios and
on songs before, there's a fatigue moment. I think when
you listen to songs and maybe you've heard them so
many times as you're trying to get it ready for
wherever it's going to go, that maybe even stop hearing
the song the way it actually is on the track,
and you're hearing things that you've maybe you thought were there.
(10:30):
When you look at an effect or a scene over
and over and over, do you see something maybe isn't
even there, or do you see it so much that
you can't actually see what the people who are going
to see the movie see? How do you patrol me?
Speaker 3 (10:44):
I went to the eye doctor once and so did
my friend, and after he took the I test. He said,
what the hell do you do for a living? You know,
because it was like off the chart. And I said,
while I'd sit in these dark screening rooms that I
watched film all day looking for errors, and we would
run them back and forth. We had special projectors that
(11:05):
would let us rock and roll them, and then we
would sometimes loop them. We had a series of rollers,
and we could just watch it in a loop again
and again and again. And then after we had watched
it so many times that we're a little dizzy, we
would flop it in the projector and watch it flopped.
(11:26):
And this is what they teach bank tellers back in
the old day, how to spot forgery names turned the
signature upside down because you see it in a different way.
And so we had all these little tricks to refresh
our eyes. But about hearing something again and again and again,
(11:48):
I must have heard many boffins died to bring you
this information. We must have heard that in a thousand times.
So we would make jokes about it. We would go
out and get the hamburger for somebody who was working
and couldn't leave, and we'd bring it back because of
the traffic and everything we would say. Then he often's
died to bring you this hamburger. And I don't think
(12:11):
George appreciated us making fun of them.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Yeah, you know, but after you hear it so much,
it's part of your world, it's part of your.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
Brain, right, Yeah, exactly, And so you have to staying
fresh in evaluating something when you've seen it so many times.
It's difficult. And I'll tell you something about Marcia Lucas.
She's one of the only people that I've ever met
who's not only a brilliant editor, but she can look
(12:39):
at your movie tell you what's wrong with it and
how to fix it. So when she first saw Spielberg
ran for his buddies, George, Marcia the screenwriter buddies greatress
was lost arc at the end, she stood up and
she said, Stephen, there's no emotion resolution. We don't know
(13:02):
what happened to India and the girl and you know,
spill work like slapped his forehead and said, you're right.
How did I forget that? So he went out and
shot the ending where they meet on the steps of
the city hall in San Francisco. They have a little
(13:23):
conversation and that is satisfied that you know they're going
to see each other again or however, I don't even remember,
but she spotted it and she said, this is what
you need to do to fix it. And that's golden.
You can't buy that.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Yeah, that makes it come together. What a great mind
that is. And you know what, of course we're dudes.
We're thinking about the adventure and she's thinking about well,
I care about the relationship as well, and that's what
makes it mass appeal.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
That's right, exactly, And so we were all really disappointed
when the two of them separated. They literally the attorneys
and the accountants came through and counted everything in the company.
They went through my editing bench and wrote down everything
(14:10):
on my editing bench and added it all up. It
came to a hundred million dollars. He gave her fifty
and he sold the company to Disney many years later
for four point zero five billion dollars. That was the
(14:33):
best investment he ever made in his life. For fifty
million dollars, he got four billion back.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
I think you could upgrade that office at Skywalker Ranch
at that point.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Well, there's a.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Joke that the that the stage chance used to say
is after Empire strikes back, and they said, we knew
that it had been successful because we saw that George
bought new tires for his Camaro.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
To more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one
a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
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