Light & Magic "Just think about it." "I think I found my people."
Parts Three and Four of Lawrence Kasdan's docuseries about ILM
This continues my response to Lawrence Kasdan’s docuseries about the history of ILM. The first response is here. I’m sharing these responses in two part chunks, just for the sake of efficiency…or consistency… or because six divides neatly by two.
These two episodes continue the story of ILM’s origins from the release of Star Wars to the edge of the digital revolution.
In this era when data is The Emperor, it’s good to be reminded of the importance of imagination. Data has no imagination. Data is at best a mirror and at worst an incomplete picture of the past. To make something new, you have to escape evidence and envision what doesn’t exist. What there is no data on. What there is no evidence for.
George Lucas looked to the past to find much of his creative inspiration. When looking into the future, though, he was having a vision other people struggled to share. He believed there was a better way to make things. He didn’t know how to make it happen himself so he invested in the ingenuity of others.
Some of this, clearly, is because Lucas himself was (is?) an impatient person.
“Patience,” says Yoda.
“Patience,” says Obi-Wan Kenobi.
“Patience?” says George Lucas, “With this editing equipment? You’ve got to be joking!”
And so, a few additional thoughts that bubbled up as I watched “Just think about it.” and “I think I found my people.” (Appropriately, that’s a lot of thinking.)
Uninvited.
Docuseries like this one have a tendency to focus more on triumph than tension. (The making of Rogue One had storied complications, but that goes almost entirely unacknowledged in any supplementary making-of material.) That’s why I appreciated the doc acknowledging that John Dykstra, who won an Oscar for the original Star Wars and was a founding member of ILM, was not invited to continue on with the company when George Lucas moved it to San Francisco.
Dykstra went on to be more than fine, eventually winning another Oscar for Spider Man 2. Still, you can see that it pains him to talk about it even all these years later. There’s a point when he tells Kasdan “I didn’t want it to end” and immediately interrupts himself to clarify “I wasn’t dragging my heels.” It’s as if he still wants to show that Lucas’s frustrations were unwarranted.
For all the myth-making, this is a documentary about a workplace. Workplaces have issues that don’t fit into victorious narratives.
Pixels, Photoshop, Pixar.
In 2022, Adobe Photoshop, CGI, Pixar, these are all distinct forces in our lives and in different industries. In Light & Magic, we see that they all emerged from the same primordial soup.
I know this is a Star Wars newsletter but … Star Trek!
I wasn’t aware of how key a role Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan had in the development of ILM. Not only was it one of the films that generated jobs and work for the company between Empire and Jedi, it also is one of the first movies where ILM put computer graphics on the big screen.
Star Trek and Star Wars are far more linked than their fanbases sometimes acknowledge, aren’t they? Ah the Kelvin Timeline! Where the Death Star, I mean, no, something else, Nero? blows up Alderaan, cough, I mean Vulcan! And Luke Skywalker, I mean James T. Kirk, stares at the Enterprise and dreams of the future, I mean, the Twin Suns of Tatooine.
Dragonslayer
Have you seen Dragonslayer? You should see it if you haven’t. It’s got the world’s coolest 80s ILM dragon.
The President of Lucasfilm Speaks!
Hey look! There’s a young Kathleen Kennedy as a producer for ET, working closely with Steven Spielberg and hanging out at ILM. It’s almost like she’s been a central part of the success of the stuff we all love!
I don’t have much time for brigade of phone-owners and comment-sectioners who complain about Kathleen Kennedy. Most of that noise is based on little-to-no knowledge of how companies like Lucasfilm actually work and/or sexism.
Just like George Lucas himself, she appears to be very exacting in her vision and demands a lot from her creative teams. She’s earned that position five times over. She’s been a part of the ILM and Lucasfilm family since the very beginning.
“It’s a feeling.”
In The Rise of Skywalker, Finn describes the Force as “a feeling.”
Dennis Muren describes George Lucas asking for an impossible shot, especially for the late 1970s. Lucas wanted to add a tauntaun crossing an icy plain on Hoth. This shot:
Dennis Muren’s response was that it could not be done. He knew what was possible and this wasn’t it. George Lucas asked him to just think about it. “Within fifteen minutes, I figured it out,” says Muren.
For all the dials and machines and cameras that are present in these stories, this is where the whole thing feels like magic to me. It’s the people and their spirit, their subconscious meshing expertise with wonder, that enables them to externalize dreams. That’s the magic.
Muren explains that his body seems to know he’s hit a solution before he really understands it himself. He says before he could “verbalize that [he had] figured it out,” his “body had figured it out.”
“I just felt it.”
It’s a feeling.
Thank you, Phil Tippet
I was quite moved to witness Phil Tippet’s honesty about his anxiety and depression. Some of the most successful people I know deal with anxiety and depression. The more people like Tippet share their experiences, the more viewers can let go of any stigma they may carry about their own internal struggles.
It wasn’t long ago that discussing things like bipolar disorder came with a hefty dose of shame and discomfort. Hearing this giant of his field open up about his mental health is inspirational. The fact that he is still making self-discoveries at this point in his life is a model to us all. (Yes, pun intended.)
This is far from a comprehensive recap, and there’s much more material in these two hours of footage and history. (I’ve barely mentioned John Knoll, guys. He is kind of a big deal.) I definitely recommend you take your own time with Light & Magic. Share your impressions in the comments!