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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Lucas Land: It's in the Cards

(Previous chapter: In the Belly of the Beast)

“Jim will see you now.”

These momentous words were uttered by Jim’s assistant Chris(tine) Butler—who would in time become a dear friend of mine—as I tried not to squirm too much in my chair right outside of the boss’s office.

Remember I had been flown all the way from Montreal to San Francisco and spent the morning going through four interviews on the hallowed grounds of Skywalker Ranch, before coming to a rest on the doorstep of the Marketing VP—the guy who would make the ultimate decision as to my fate within the Lucasfilm organization.

In a late-nineties world that was just learning to harness the power of the Internet, my future position as lead writer (and soon-to-be editor) of starwars.com fell somewhere between the Marketing and Web teams. That’s one reason the interview process was so grueling to begin with: managers tried to see whether the fresh recruit knew what to make of that new tool, how to use it to maximum effect, what pitfalls to avoid, and the kind of future-proofing the entire online enterprise might require—because there were myriad things in that area they didn’t quite know themselves. (Frankly, I wasn’t too sure about most of that stuff, but I believe I succeeded in selling my abilities well enough for everyone to trust that what I didn’t know, I would quickly figure out.)
They also needed to ensure I was someone who knew and loved Star Wars well enough, but that I would know not to behave like a delirious fanboy around the place, and could keep a professional composure around celebrities I might pass by on the Ranch, or else directly interact with in the course of my reportorial duties. (I came the closest to losing it when, half a year later, I spent an afternoon with legendary sound designer Ben Burtt in his Skywalker Sound studio—a story for another day.) They wanted to pick the right addition to their very exclusive family, and I couldn’t blame them. But it made the whole thing nerve wracking in the extreme.

When David West Reynolds, Steve Sansweet and I got back from lunch, the VP of Marketing was in the thick of things with some other concern; it sounded like he hadn’t even left his office to have a bite. By that point I could hardly breathe, so I asked if there was time for me to get back outside and clear my head a little before the big interview. Sansweet nodded with a smile: “Of course, kid.”
(He still calls me “kid” to this day, and I’ve racked up 49 revolutions around the sun at the time of this writing. Whenever Han Solo says it to Luke Skywalker in one of the Star Wars movies, I hear my friend Steve.)

I quickly went down the Brook House exterior staircase and took a few steps towards a copse of trees before the sight of the Main House stopped me dead in my tracks. I had laid eyes on the faux Victorian beauty many times since my arrival earlier that morning, but now it was talking to me.
And it was telling me I had already won.
Not that earning the position was a certainty, of course. But whether or not this adventure turned into a job, I had been flown to Lucasfilm on George’s dime, and I was standing right smack in the middle of Skywalker Ranch, that mythical place that’s never open to the public. How many people get to experience that? Up until a few weeks prior, I had been wondering if I’d ever get a chance to visit the Ranch in any capacity. And now I was there, magically transported into the heart of all things Star Wars and Indiana Jones, two universes that had fueled my childhood.
I believe that’s what saved me—the thought that even given a catastrophic outcome (not getting the job), I had accomplished something I never quite believed would happen. I started breathing again, I felt my entire body relax, and I walked back to the Brook House with renewed confidence.

Chris smiled at me as soon as I reached the mezzanine where Jim Ward’s office was located. “Have a seat. Shouldn’t take long.”
I sat in the chair she was nodding at, attempting to look cool and comfortable. The boss was still on the phone, sounding as agitated as when I’d left; I did my best to blank that out. Against the opposite wall stood a pristine Star Wars pinball machine, no doubt a gift from the manufacturer, and one that nobody ever used. Despite being plugged in and fully functional, its role was decorative—something I would eventually come to change with regular Friday pinball tournaments. (I only ever won a couple of them.)
Then the conversation on the other side of the heavy wooden door ceased, Chris got a quick call at her desk, and she turned to me.

“Jim will see you now.”

Back then Jim Ward was a beast of a man: tall, big and with a voice to make Zeus himself shake in his sandals. Saying he made an impression is selling the experience short. (He has since slimmed down a bit, which I’m sure doesn’t take anything away from his formidable presence.)  He also had smart, piercing blue eyes that connected with anyone he crossed paths with. A veteran of Apple, Nike and Microsoft, Jim didn’t take bullshit from anyone, and certainly didn’t spread any of it around. The first time you shook hands with him—when his large and powerful mitt swallowed your fingers whole—you knew the man was the real deal. You could quite literally feel it.

“Have a seat!”

We sat on a pair of short couches that flanked an elongated coffee table, between Jim’s desk and a small conference table. It wasn’t a large office by any means, but a comfortable one, with some nice windows and a small refreshments fridge in one corner. As with every enclosed space on the Ranch, it looked and felt much more like a living room than an office.

By that point the calming effect of my walk outside was starting to fade out like an 80s pop song, but Jim wasted no time putting me at ease. He proceeded to tell me about himself, asked about my studies (philosophy & literature!), my love of Star Wars, my trip to Tunisia, the morning’s four job interviews... and then pointed to a stack of Star Wars CCG cards on the coffee table between us.
Which I had noticed the instant I walked into his office, to be sure.
I thought Jim was following up on the Tunisia question, how the results of that game’s world championship had whisked me away to northern Africa, and so on. But that’s not what he had in mind.

I would later understand that everyone before Jim had vetted me on pretty much everything they needed to confirm about my abilities. The one, final matter keeping Jim on the fence was my capacity to clearly express complex concepts in English—because I had been raised in French. And the way he decided to go about figuring this out told me a whole lot about the man I was about to start working for.

“I never play games, I just don’t have the time for it,” Jim said. “So I’d like you to teach me—a complete outsider—how to play this.”

And so it was that my fifth and final interview involved teaching the Marketing VP of Lucasfilm the rules of the strategy game that had brought me there in the first place. To paraphrase an oft-quoted line from the original Star Wars movie, the circle was now complete.

It went splendidly: years of teaching all kinds of games to all sorts of strangers had prepared me for this like nothing else could have. And while I’m not sure Jim grasped every nuance of that rather complex card game, he seemed to understand the core concepts and some of the strategy.
At the end of my presentation, he stood up, shook my hand once more and thanked me for teaching him. (How often do you hear something like that in a job interview?)

“We’ll be in touch.”

A few hours later, while I was enjoying an early evening at my friend (and future coworker) David’s place about 30 minutes away from Skywalker Ranch, the phone rang and David picked up. He went through a series of “yeses,” “okays” and “got its” before hanging up and turning to me with a straight face. “The job is yours if you want it,” he announced, his face lighting up like a Christmas tree.
IF I wanted it? I’d never wanted anything that badly in my life.

* * *

The next few weeks flew by in a blur. I had to get ready to move, say goodbye to my old life and prepare to start a new one, and go through the legal process of earning the right to live and work in the US of A. Which boiled down to Lucasfilm needing to demonstrate that nobody else in America could do the job (!), and my having to wait for the immigration department to approve my papers—at the airport, while I sat in the adjoining room (!!)—and grant me a work visa. (I believe I sweated more during the half hour I waited there than during my entire day of job interviews at Lucasfilm.)

It all worked out in the end, with Lucasfilm not only paying for my relocation (which included movers packing up all of my stuff and loading it onto an 18-wheeler that would meet me in San Francisco a month down the line), but also setting me up with a hotel room and a rental car for a few weeks, until I could find an apartment and acquire my own vehicle.

I showed up at the Skywalker Ranch gate—on my own—for the first time on a sunny Thursday morning in the early autumn of northern California, having just driven through a forest of giant redwoods where they shot the speeder bike chase sequence for Return of the Jedi. The simple fact that the guard at the gate let me through was exhilarating enough, but the sentiment paled in comparison to the bone-rattling thrill I felt driving out onto the grounds of the Ranch.
I had made it.
Yet, despite everything I had to brave to win my small place inside George’s empire, it was clear to me that my Lucasfilm adventure was just getting started. I had an entire universe waiting for me.

My old Mazda 626 parked under the Carriage House, I walked across the Ranch’s backyard and made my way to the Brook House. My Brook House, I found myself trying to think. I still felt like an impostor, mind you, but I was working hard to convince my stunned brain that I belonged in that fantastical, otherworldly place.
As I got close enough to hear the titular brook trickling under the building, David stepped out onto the landing at the top of the stairs and spread his arms in a welcoming gesture. His mouth broke into a gleaming smile as I climbed the steps that would take me to my office and my first day of work as a Lucasfilm employee; his extended right hand seemed all at once like an offer to help vanquish the few remaining stairs that separated us, and a congratulatory demonstration.
I can still remember the look in his eyes when I reached the top of the staircase and took his hand. He only said, “Welcome home.”
And then we went inside.

(Next chapter: Stag Night)

(Full series here)

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