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