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Santa Cruz author Michael Rubin traces the technological legacy of George Lucas and his Skywalker Ranch
October 16, 2005
As Michael Rubin sees it, George Lucas can claim a certain kinship with Thomas Jefferson, other than the fact that both men belong to the fraternity of American visionaries. If his tombstone is any guide — and, let's face it, can there be a better guide than a tombstone? — Jefferson hoped to be remembered as "the author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom and Father of the University of Virginia." Instead, he's most remembered as two-term President of the United States and, most recently, the smirking face on the nickel.
Lucas, likewise, is likely to be remembered for something other than what he might hope. He is, of course, world-famous as the creator of the most successful movie franchise in history, the mind behind the "Star Wars" saga.
But, as Rubin makes clear in his new book, "Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution," the more interesting story, and Lucas's more durable legacy, is his role in the development of film technology that has fundamentally changed the way movies are made and given filmmakers new freedoms to more clearly bring their visions to the screen.
"He's going to go down in history as the creator of 'Star Wars,' which is fine," said Santa Cruzan Rubin, a former employee at LucasFilm, who now owns the Petroglyph pottery studio in downtown Santa Cruz.
"But on my desktop, I can shoot a movie. I can edit a movie. I can put sound on it. I can put it on the Web, thanks in very large part to Lucas."
Rubin, who will speak at a book signing at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Tuesday, stresses that his book is not a biography of Lucas, or an account of how "Star Wars" came to be. Rather, it's more a history of the technological revolution that transformed not only filmmaking, but all media. It's a revolution largely centered at Lucas's Marin County compound Skywalker Ranch.
For 10 years, before he and his wife, Jennifer, moved to Santa Cruz to begin Petroglyph, Michael Rubin worked as a liaison between LucasFilm and Hollywood. His job was essentially to sell hidebound Hollywood on the new computer technologies that were about to come and change the industry forever.
By the time Rubin joined the company, LucasFilm was on shaky financial ground. The first "Star Wars" trilogy had been made and Lucas had churned most of his profits into the research and development of products that had no place in the market.
Rubin's job was to show off the technology to directors like Terry Gilliam and stars like Barbra Streisand, to convince them a new way of making films was on the horizon.
"I saw the beginning of the world changing over to this stuff," he said. By the mid-1990s, films such as "Jurassic Park" and "Toy Story," that were virtual commercials for the technologies LucasFilm was developing, had become huge hits.
The revolution had come.
Because of his ties with LucasFilm and his place in the story, Rubin figured he could write a definitive history of how computers took over Hollywood. The book focuses on the heady period of the late '60s and early '70s when old-line Hollywood was dying away and the New Wave of young filmmakers was just beginning to break.
But it's the director of another famous trilogy that figures prominently in the early going.
Francis Ford Coppola, the director of "The Godfather" films, was the kind of revolutionary thinker that laid the foundation for what Lucas would later do at Skywalker Ranch.
"If you read what Coppola was saying at the time," said Rubin, "this guy was predicting the future in incredible clarity: Some day everyone's going to have a camera and be able to make movies. Someday, technology is going to set us free from the yoke of the studios."
Lucas, a few years younger than Coppola, was entranced by these ideas and the two men made a fruitful philosophical partnership. And the key to their eventual success in new technology was their immediate success in traditional Hollywood filmmaking.
"It just turns out that Coppola became one of America's greatest filmmakers," said Rubin. "And it just turns out that Lucas made gazillions of dollars. What are the odds of that happening? It's like Socrates and Plato, but Plato gets a gazillion dollars."
The two, however, had constrasting personalities. Where Coppola was passionate and larger than life, Lucas was pragmatic and focused.
Though it's often assumed otherwise, the first "Star Wars" film was made entirely with conventional effects. The film's runaway box-office success, however, allowed Lucas to fund Skywalker Ranch, a place that was then and is now designed for specific technological purposes.
"The Ranch is not Xanadu," said Rubin. "It's not a tribute to his greatness. The vision was of a campus of young people making movies, a filmmaking center. It was, really, USC where Lucas went to college. He loved USC."
"Droidmaker" chronicles a particular genius on the part of Lucas of hiring exactly the right people, including unsung heroes such as bearded Mormon Ed Catmull, an early tinkerer in computerized movies, who created one of the first digitized computer animations as a student at the University of Utah.
The huge profits from "Star Wars" and its sequels allowed Lucas to give his scientists and computer geeks time and room to develop new technologies that Lucas himself felt was essential to making movies.
"I don't think he had a particular passion to invent stuff," said Rubin of Lucas who he interviewed for the book. "His attitude was rather, 'This must be invented and if no one else is going to do it, I'm going to get it started.'
"People tend to think of him as the father of digital special effects. Yeah, but that's a really narrow credit to have. He's really the foster parent of all computer animation, all digital video and all digital audio."
LucasFilm and the Skywalker Ranch have historically been wary of those who want to write about Lucas or what goes on at the Ranch. Rubin is insider enough to get access to key players in the story, yet outsider enough to realize that his book must resist control or manipulation of the Lucas brain trust.
"I had to have a conversation with Lucas about this and try to make my case," said Rubin. "I said, 'I do believe that LucasFilm has a place in history, but it cannot come out of its PR department.' So they at first suggested, 'Yeah, why don't you write it, and we'll publish it here.' And I had to tell them, 'No, you can't touch it. You can't even look at it.' Talk about putting a knot in their stomachs."
Rubin did much of his interviewing and research at Skywalker Ranch while the final episode of the second "Star Wars" trilogy was being completed. This put additional strains on all concerned, but he figured he had to be able to release his book at about the same time "Episode Three" was hitting the DVD market.
Through negotiations, Rubin got his access, though he's somewhat uncertain how the notoriously prickly Lucas might receive his book.
"People have been excised from the history of the Skywalker Ranch," he said. "There is an expression: 'Banned from the Ranch.' I'm risking being banned from the Ranch."
Still, Rubin believes that "Droidmaker" presents an accurate portrait of the famously elusive George Lucas.
"He's not a gadget guy. He's not Steve Jobs. He's not Bill Gates. He says it over and over. He's just a guy who likes to make movies.
"I'm not really a big Lucas fan," said Rubin. "I was an employee. I was excited to be there because it was a cool place to be. But I think I've finally nailed down what I respect about the guy. He has a great visual sense. He's credited with being a good storyteller, but he's not a great writer. He's a visionary, but he's not a technologist. He said to me at one point, 'I just wanted to build a pyramid because I wanted a pyramid. It didn't dawn on me that it would take 20 years to build.' "
Source : santacruzsentinel
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