Within a hot warehouse in Van Nuys, Calif., they were given a $1 million budget to literally invent new hardware and techniques to bring Lucas’ vision of Star Wars to life. They collected a group of young artists and tech geeks with varied backgrounds, including now legends Richard Edlund, Joe Johnston, Phil Tippett, and Dennis Muren. Lucasfilm producer Gary Kurtz and Dykstra set out to headhunt the best talent they could find. John Dykstra was recommended by special effects legend Douglas Trumbull ( Close Encounters of the Third Kind) to supervise the start of Industrial Light & Magic. The first episode, “Gang of Outsiders,” starts with archival footage of Lucas explaining why he had to start a visual effects company for Star Wars: there weren't any existing shops that could handle the depth and breadth of shots that he envisioned. Where it stumbles is in its pacing, frontloading episodes with a micro focus on Star Wars and then in the later episodes, rushing through 30 years of VFX innovation to end on what feels like a very sanitized, underwhelming corporate sizzle reel. As a series, it works best when it focuses on the incredible talent who launched the company and have since become legends in their field. Like those magazines of old, the series goes deep, especially with the original Star Wars trilogy, in regards to how ILM became synonymous with creating modern special effects and visual effects. And it’s his ground level perspective that provides the necessary insider’s point of view in telling how Lucas’ special effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, came to be in the new six-part Disney+ docuseries, Light & Magic. Writer/director Lawrence Kasdan was smack in the middle of that creative whirlwind, working with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as a screenwriter on the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. And for those interested in the making of the movies, like me, they were a virtual master class in technique and innovation. Starlog, Cinefantastique, Fangoria, and Cinefex, just to name a few, specialized in revealing the below-the-line creative people who brought the spectacle to life. If you grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s and loved movies, that was a magical time for film magazines.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |