Lucas Land: Stag Night

 (Previous chapter: It's in the Cards)

“Hey, wanna go see Raiders of the Lost Ark on Friday night?”

Standing tall behind an actual vineyard, Skywalker Sound is a big winery-looking, red brick building that’s home to everything and anything that has to do with sound within Skywalker Ranch. Recording studios (large enough to hold an orchestra), foley studios (footsteps and slamming doors), mixing studios, editing suites, plus a litany of actual offices... you name it, it’s all in there.

And there’s one more thing you can find here: a private screening room called the Stag Theater. With its 300-soul capacity, it’s about the size of your average multiplex theater. And it’s not especially luxurious either, instead coming across as a very nice room, but nothing spectacular. The truth is, you can’t see what’s mind-blowingly incredible about the Stag.
But you sure as hell can hear it.

Back in 1983, Lucasfilm deployed the THX system to ensure that showings of Return of the Jedi would conform to certain audio standards. So in high-end theaters, the movie soundtrack sounded exactly the way the mixing engineer intended—or as close to it as technical limitations and architectural concerns allowed. The system took its name from George Lucas’s first feature film, THX 1138, but also from its inventor’s namesake, hence the Tomlinson Holman Xperiment.

(During my orientation day at Lucasfilm, a sweet HR lady asked my small group of new employees if anyone knew how the THX system got its name. A few hands went up, and when one of them was selected to offer an answer—THX 1138—all the others fell back down, deflated. The cocky, 25-year-old me had been waiting for just that moment to raise my own hand, and mention Tomlinson Holman when called upon. Our HR lady was quick to congratulate me on my erudite answer, but a quick look around the room sufficed to confirm that I had just marked my territory with the smell of absolute dorkness.)

THX went on to certify more than theaters: home sound systems, computer sound cards, physical movie releases (VHS, Laserdiscs, DVDs...) and so on. But its original intent had always been the theater experience. And so the Stag was built around THX.

Think of the Stag Theater as the king of THX: it’s the reference theater, built according to the exact specifications the THX system requires. Its equipment not only provides the greatest surround sound you can experience at the movies, but it also perfectly reproduces what the mixing engineer heard in his or her studio. In other words, the Stag is what every other movie theater around the world tries to be. And if they come close enough, they get the THX certification.
So you can imagine what it sounds like when you step into that sonic temple. The room is neither too muffled, nor too echoey; neither too velvety, nor too wooden. It’s just a perfect balance between liquid and solid. Pure aural bliss.

When I walked in there for the first time—with permission to take a quick peek on my way to lunch—the whole thing felt like a religious experience. My own breathing sounded like the most expertly mixed gust of wind in the history of cinema, my own footsteps altogether like the start of something wondrous and the end of everything. It brought tears to my eyes and I never wanted to leave.
(Those who know me and my hyper-acute hearing will tell you I don’t exaggerate about that stuff: nowhere else have I heard such perfect acoustics, even when the room was empty and no sound was playing. It was beauty at a level that causes pain.)

About a month into my Lucasfilm tenure, a coworker asked me if I wanted to go see Raiders of the Lost Ark with him at the end of the week. He proceeded to explain that, once in a while, Lucasfilm held screenings for employees... at the Stag Theater. Not usually LFL productions, either: it just happened that this time around they were showing Raiders, one of my favorite movies.

So, would I go?
A few expletives later, we had a date.

Friday night couldn’t swing by fast enough. When it finally did, I showed up early to make sure I could sit in the exact center of the Stag Theater, grabbing the sweet spot to end all sweet spots. The room filled up quickly, sometimes with faces whose owners I’d had a chance to meet, but usually with friendly strangers I hoped I would get to know. (It would soon dawn on me that my role as internal reporter meant that I could meet whomever I wanted on Skywalker Ranch—though I did infiltrate ILM a few times—but I hadn’t yet made that realization.)

Right before the movie started, I looked ahead and noticed I was sitting behind George Lucas. (I would later hear that Steven Spielberg was supposed to join him for the showing, but couldn’t make it at the last minute.) He was actually one seat over on my left, which meant that during the entire evening, I watched Raiders with one eye on the screen, and one eye on George. I saw him smile, nod his head, then press his lips together and furrow his brow, in sync with what I assumed were scenes he was still enjoying—almost 20 years down the line—and others he wished had turned out better. (He reacted strongly to the end sequence where Nazi heads melt and explode, but whether his body language expressed revulsion or pride, I’ll never know.) He would sometimes lean over to laugh or whisper something in producer Rick McCallum’s ear, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

Remember we were watching this thunderous adventure in the Stag Theater, where the soundtrack was LOUD yet perfectly defined. I had frankly never heard a movie sound like that, and I fear I might there and then have forever damaged my aural enjoyment of cinema: it would all be downhill going forward. From the rumble of that giant boulder bearing down on Indiana Jones, all the way to the hissing of snakes (so many snakes!) and the crack of our archaeologist’s whip, every frequency was just right, everything mixed together into the perfect mélange. I felt enthralled, as if some alchemical process had transmuted sound into a hypnotic compound delivered straight into my brain.

There was a round of applause at the conclusion of the movie—on that ominous shot of an endless warehouse where the titular ark is re-buried, this time amongst a million anonymous crates—and every single spectator remained in their seat until the last note of the end credits had died down. (Which it did with perfect grace.)
As the lights came on, we all stood, George turned around while putting on his sports jacket—it was a chilly evening—and we nodded a greeting to each other. I blinked hard: George Lucas had gestured a “hello” at me after a showing of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I said something—I like to tell myself it was “Still a great movie!” or some other enthusiastic compliment, but to tell the truth I can’t remember what crawled out from between my lips. It might not even have been intelligible: George smiled politely and we all ambled towards the exit.

The hallway between the actual theater and the exterior door only took a moment to cross, but for that brief swatch of eternity, I forgot where I stood: I was just one moviegoer amongst many, walking out after an entertaining evening. So when I stepped outside and looked around, the realization that I was at Skywalker Ranch hit me like a road sign flung around by a tornado.
Wonders within wonders.

I would soon find exciting new reasons to go back to the Stag, but as a first introduction, it left a mark I don't think will ever wash away.

 

(Next chapter: ID Please)

(Full series here)

 

 

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Flash Review — Brothers at War: 1862

Players: 2
Age: 14+
Playtime: 60-240 min
Complexity: 8.5/10

Over the years, I played a lot of games covering the American Civil War. Many were excellent, but most proved too difficult to crack for the average boardgamer out there. (Hence my ongoing silence about those games in my flash reviews.) Brothers at War stands out in that crowd: not only does it run on an intuitive and exception-free engine, but it also features a host of short scenarios that will make newcomers feel welcome instead of sending them screaming into the night.

Those scenarios—there are 13 of them in total—pit Union and Confederate brigades against each other on four different maps: Antietam, South Mountain, Mill Springs and Valverde. The hexes are big, the counters on the map are few, and the whole thing is powered by a chit-pull activation system. This means that a cardboard chit is selected at random, and the identity of that chit determines which brigade gets to act. That brigade’s various units might move, fire at the enemy, or assault an adjacent hex—a dangerous proposition, but you know, desperate times call for crazy fools who get the job done.

One of the game’s innovations concerns that chit-pull mechanic. In classic chit-pull designs, each used chit is set aside before moving on to the next one, and once two Time chits (out of two or three in the pool) make an appearance, the turn is over. In Brothers at War, however, a turn starts with just one Time chit in the pool, and each chit drawn from the pool is placed on the next space of the activation track. Many of those spaces are blank, but some will grant players additional strategy cards (useful to surprise your opponent with a twist they were hoping wouldn’t come), while other spaces will throw an additional Time chit into the pool, increasing the odds of the turn screeching to a halt next time a chit gets fished out of the pool.
And the fact that each map comes with its own activation track really helps give each battle a unique vibe, with a distinctive ebb and flow. Have Time chits added lazily to the pool, and you get a drawn out engagement; but make sure the Time chits get thrown in at a furious pace, and you end up with that snowball feeling of a battle, where the end is always around the next corner—and will your artillery cross that river in time? (I’m looking at you, Valverde!)

Brothers at War doesn’t get talked about much, and it deserves a much better fate.
I heartily recommend it, whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a wet-behind-the-ears recruit still struggling to load their musket rifle.

Most easily forgotten rule: An attacked unit gets one additional save roll if its attacker moved before firing at it.

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