George Lucas and Film’s Tech Revolution

George Lucas leaned against a gleaming redwood railing inside the Victorian ranch house that serves as his film empire’s headquarters, listening to a photographer bemoan the lack of light.

Leaping into director’s mode, the creator of the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” movie trilogies sent two assistants scurrying with a round reflector through a set of French doors to a deck 20 feet away.

“A little higher,” he shouted. “Now tilt it down.” Instantly, golden light shimmered across his face, prompting a satisfied grin.

It was a rare “analog” moment for a man more inclined these days to achieve just the right lighting effect with high-powered computers and digital editing techniques that can turn night into day, animate the dead and create synthetic dinosaurs all too real in their ferocity.

Hollywood is embracing digital, all right, and in large part it’s thanks to the pioneering work of Lucas and the phalanx of artists and technicians he has assembled over two decades in Northern California’s mellow Marin County.

Here, hundreds of miles from the land of celluloid dreams--but a heartbeat away over fiber-optic cables--Lucasfilm Ltd. and a clutch of related high-technology ventures have been blazing trails in special effects, sound technology and games for movies, television and home computers.

Behind this digital revolution in entertainment is the rapid advance of computer technology, which makes it possible to create and manipulate the high-resolution images needed for big-screen movies. No longer must filmmakers depend on photochemical processes, photographic exposure tricks, elaborate models and risky stunts.

Instead, artists and technicians craft computer images that can be grafted onto film. Computer-generated special effects are increasingly popping up in movies, interactive computer games and advertising.

As scores of individuals and companies hurl themselves onto this fast-moving bandwagon--notably the Hollywood “Dream Team” of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen--many are turning to Lucas for guidance or drawing from their years of experience in his fold. He seems to relish playing the wise Yoda to the brash Jedi warriors endeavoring to divine from the primordial swampland the entertainment media of the future.

Lucas is acutely aware of how difficult it is to be on the bleeding edge of entertainment, especially when it entails melding high tech and Hollywood--two industries with vastly different cultures. He doesn’t envy the new kids on the block who are trying to figure out what sort of interactive experience will become the killer content of the ‘90s.

“In the beginning, everybody said, ‘Oh, you’re going to have movies where you have lots of endings,’ and that kind of thing, but that’s not really what it’s all about,” Lucas said recently in his office at Skywalker Ranch, nestled in the bucolic, oak-studded hills near San Rafael. “And people have jumped in and said, ‘Oh, multimedia, this is the big business; cash in now.’

“Well, we’ve been in this business a long time, and we’ve been struggling a long time in the market,” he said, dressed in his trademark blue jeans, plaid shirt and worn sneakers. “ . . . We just haven’t gotten involved in the glitz and the hype of the whole thing.”

Far from feeling threatened by DreamWorks SKG and DreamWorks Interactive--the film studio and multimedia venture formed by best pal Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen with backing from the likes of Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen--Lucas portrays them as worthy compatriots and potential customers. In fact, Lucas’ people are helping the fledgling DreamWorks design its own futuristic digital facility, whereas Lucas’ eight-year effort to build a state-of-the-art operation at Skywalker Ranch is mired in debate with growth-averse Marinites.

“It may be that their facility will be built and finished before we even get ours started,” he said.

The 51-year-old filmmaker, whose wiry frame has filled out a bit and whose thick hair and beard now sport a heavy sprinkling of gray, discounted any suggestion that he is concerned about being surpassed at the game he helped invent.

For one thing, Lucas has a formidable head start. Besides, he noted, others’ success would only advance his end of the entertainment industry, prompting even more demand for services such as visual and sound effects and 3-D computer graphics--the stocks in trade of Industrial Light & Magic, Lucas’ renowned special effects house.

And DreamWorks--which plans to produce 12 movies a year by decade’s end, along with TV shows, animated films, interactive games and recordings--so far seems disinclined to forge on its own into the kinds of big-scale visual effects at which ILM excels.

“I want to see Steven succeed,” Lucas said. “I don’t think [that] in him succeeding--even though we’re in competitive businesses--it’s going to hurt me. And we have an agreement not to overtly hurt each other.”

In fact, there is a fair measure of dependency mixed in with the mutual admiration.

“ILM continues to supply the best artists for special effects in the film industry,” Spielberg said last week at a Mountain View, Calif., news conference where DreamWorks announced a $50-million deal with Silicon Graphics Inc., a prime maker of computer graphics workstations, to build a digital facility to be used for animated films and, eventually, other forms of entertainment.

“ILM has no peer, and there is no one even close,” Spielberg said. “There will always be a creative relationship between ILM and the films that I make. We’ll probably account for 50% of their revenue this year, so they need us too. We will be together forever.”

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Clearly, neither man has lacked for success. Between them, and often as partners, they’ve been responsible for more than half a dozen of the top-grossing movies of all time, all laden with ILM special effects. Those films include “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” “Star Wars,” “Jurassic Park” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Many Lucas proteges from ILM and LucasArts Entertainment, his computer games company, have left to start their own enterprises, helping to create a flourishing industry in a field that was barren when Lucas went looking for ways to put his “Star Wars” visions of X-wing fighters and Death Star trenches on screen.

To do that work, he had to build his own mini-studio from scratch in an industrial building near Van Nuys Airport, where model builders, matte painters and blue-screen wizards pulled off much of the space epic’s magic, resurrecting the moribund special effects trade.

Twenty years later, computer-generated images are increasingly the mode of choice for visual effects, with perhaps 30 companies competing for Hollywood’s business. Meanwhile, the entertainment and high-tech industries are abuzz with chatter about how convergence, multimedia and video on demand will transform society as we know it, turning every home into a consumer-directed amusement and information haven.

Lucas, who dismisses many of the more wild-eyed claims, doesn’t profess to have all the answers about these emerging technologies. But he’s got a heck of a lead on figuring them out.

With 450 people and 180 high-powered workstations--more than any other organization except NASA--his ILM is by far the world’s largest effects house, dwarfing rivals such as Boss Film Studios and Digital Domain (both founded by ex-Lucasites). The company has won 14 Oscars for best visual effects and eight for technical achievement.

ILM, based several miles from Skywalker Ranch in San Rafael, is now collecting favorable reviews for its work in creating the friendly ghost for the film “Casper.” The movie’s 47 minutes of character animation and digital effects give it the most computer graphics of any film ever made. That easily tops the 6 1/2 minutes of ILM’s animated dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park,” the blockbuster that started the digital revolution in the effects business.

Previous ILM breakthroughs include the first example of morphing (or morfing, in Lucas parlance), the fluid, on-screen transformation of one object into another, in the 1988 film “Willow”; the creation of the liquidy, human-emulating “pseudopod” in “The Abyss” in 1989; the first computer-generated main character, the T-1000, in 1991’s “Terminator 2,” and the eye-bulging, tongue-lolling antics of 1994’s “The Mask.” (Lucas’ personal favorite? The “Jurassic” dinosaurs, which he says brought tears to his eyes.)

Nor is ILM the only ground-breaker in the Lucas empire.

AvidDroid, a digital editing system being developed under the Lucas umbrella, is making it possible for directors and producers to view rough cuts, edit film and preview complex effects shots more quickly and easily. Skywalker Sound handles sound effects and editing. And THX, Lucas’ body-vibrating theater sound system, is moving into homes.

LucasArts Entertainment, meanwhile, holds title to several top-selling games, many of them based on “Star Wars” characters or themes. Exploiting that lucrative franchise has been key to putting the company in the black and boosting growth to the point that the group’s 160 employees will soon be moving into larger quarters after outgrowing three buildings in San Rafael. In the works is “The Dig,” an interactive game about space explorers abducted by aliens to a strange planet. It is being developed in collaboration with Spielberg, who brought the idea to LucasArts.

Lucas is rare in taking such a soup-to-nuts, all-encompassing approach to entertainment media.

“George saw this revolution coming long before most of his contemporaries,” said Steve Starkey, who co-produced “Forrest Gump,” for which ILM’s digital effects included star Tom Hanks’ brief chat and handshake with President John F. Kennedy. “He’s still a catalyst for the new things we’re able to do.”

But Lucas emphasized that achieving more technological bells and whistles is not his chief priority. Says Richard Edlund, founder and president of Boss Film Studios, who won four Oscars for his work on Lucas films: “George is really a storyteller. He doesn’t look at technology as anything but a means to an end.”

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For Lucas, who’s spending most of his time these days preparing a trio of screenplays for the eagerly awaited “prequels” to “Star Wars,” the challenge lately has been to bring the cost of special effects down to Earth for independent filmmakers lacking the clout of a Lucas, a Spielberg or a Martin Scorsese.

He chuckled at a competitor’s suggestion that for the new “Star Wars” films, he might turn to an outside effects source because ILM has gotten prohibitively expensive. On the contrary, Lucas said, advances at ILM have made it easier to conceive outlandish characters and situations; he talks in terms of doing 10 times as many effects for half the cost.

“Fortunately, I’m the chairman of the board,” he said. “I can say, ‘You will do this.’ I can’t, obviously, do it at a loss. I’m also the [sole] stockholder, and I want to continually advance ILM, which means I can’t lose money. What I can do is push them so that they can learn new ways of doing things that are less expensive than the ways they’ve been doing them in the past.”

ILM affords Lucas, a Modesto native who graduated from USC’s film school in 1966, an enviable luxury in this low-margin business. The company, he said, exists primarily to serve him as a filmmaker, not to make a pile of money for shareholders.

“It’s there to be the best that it can be,” he said. “The reason that ILM is so successful is that we have taken every bit of money that that company has generated and poured it right back into the business. Everything has gone back into buying new equipment; everything has gone into updating; everything has gone into training people.”

Each project enables the company to build on its expertise. “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,” Lucas’ groundbreaking--if little-watched--TV series, has proven to be a laboratory for films, as has “Radioland Murders,” a 1994 comedy that fizzled at the box office but taught Lucas’ people much about effects.

These are the kinds of risky serials and movies that Lucas said can be made on the cheap, relatively speaking, thanks to computers’ ability to replicate crowds and give shape to realistic, expensive-looking sets without the need to actually build them and fill them with people.

In “Young Indy” episodes, for example, beautiful sunsets have been digitally superimposed over plain blue afternoon skies. Computers have created ornate box seats on sets that start with bare plywood. A stage full of fan dancers was generated from just a few people, with the computer cloning them in concentric circles. In “Forrest Gump,” similar technology was used to produce the hordes at an anti-Vietnam War rally around the reflecting pool on the Washington Mall.

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With big action films routinely costing more than $100 million these days, even seemingly sure bets like the new “Star Wars” movies will have to be made with some fiscal discipline if they are to show a good profit. Lucas’ years of experimentation in digital, he said, make it easier to devise effects that can be handled fairly simply--and inexpensively.

“It’s our hope that the three [films] will cost very little more than . . . one of today’s blockbusters,” said Gordon Radley, Lucasfilm president.

For the industry’s newcomers, a former Lucas game company employee had some sobering thoughts.

“We [at the game company] weren’t overshooting people’s expectations,” said Ron Gilbert, co-founder and creative director of Humongous Entertainment, a Seattle-area maker of computer entertainment products for children. “With a lot of these Hollywood companies, the vision is much larger than the reality. Vision will cause them to fail.”

As for DreamWorks Interactive, Gilbert said he worries that its deep-pocket founders might just “throw money at it,” hoping to find the right formula for success in multimedia.

Finding that formula, Lucas suggested, will be crucial to prospering in the entertainment media of the future--especially for players such as Paul Allen, who is anteing up $500 million for a small stake in DreamWorks.

“In a movie, you can lose $30 million to $60 million in the blink of an eye,” he said. “In this new game, it’s going to be billions in the blink of an eye. It’s a very big game.

“The whole industry is still in its infancy. . . .” Lucas said. “We’ve got a lot of stuff going on, but nobody has done ‘Birth of a Nation’ yet. And it will probably be a few years before ‘Birth of a Nation’ is made, which is the fun part.

“All this stuff is about to happen and nothing’s happened yet. It’s exciting.”

Times staff writer Julie Pitta contributed to this report from Mountain View, Calif.