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“I knew he was unhappy,” Dykstra says in Light & Magic. And as things fell behind, Lucas went to war with Dykstra, repeatedly clashing over what was going wrong or wasn’t happening at all.

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In addition to Johnston, he brought in stop-motion magician Phil Tippett, who manipulated the AT-AT Imperial walker battle in The Empire Strikes Back Dennis Muren, who would go on to develop revolutionary CGI effects for Young Sherlock Holmes, Terminator 2, and Jurassic Park and Richard Edlund, who figured out how to make a suburban house look like it imploded for Poltergeist. Leading one was another matter.ĭykstra himself had developed cutting-edge effects for commercials and the 1972 sci-fi film Silent Running, and he knew the underground community of geeks, techies, and illustrators who became the company’s founding members.

John Dykstra, then the chief of ILM, was great at assembling a team. But there wasn’t a lot of organizational skills.”

There was a million tons of genius there. “Someone had to step in, because they had plenty of genius. “We needed to get an adult in the room and say, ‘Look, this is what needs to happen!’ ” Lucas says in the series. The problem in the early days was that all of the team’s creative energy was haphazard. Every time you see the archival footage of him, you say, ‘Wait, he’s doing that too?’ He’s pushing the.

He could see the big picture and he worked his ass off all the time. “He’s a great artist, you know? I mean, if I spent the rest of my life, I couldn’t do one drawing that looked like Joe Johnston’s, and he has done thousands of them. “To me, he is one of the most amazing because he can do anything,” Kasdan says. Johnston was not just a breakout star from ILM but becomes one of the stars of Light & Magic. It was big enough to comfortably fit two people, although one vintage photo in Light & Magic shows it stuffed uncomfortably with eight.Ī 1970s parking lot party scene from Light & Magic. At one point during the postproduction of Star Wars, one of them acquired a military-grade shipping container and transformed it into a makeshift hot tub in the parking lot. The work they did in the mid-’70s changed everything in an industry that was still dangling models from strings or struggling to make the realism of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey seem more fast-paced and thrilling.īreaking new ground on Star Wars was so all-consuming that the personal lives of these mostly 20-somethings could only be lived out in the margins at work. They designed a whole universe of aliens, vehicles, and worlds that seemed both real and fantastical at the same time. They generated the illusion of gargantuan starships and space stations using itty-bitty models. In fact, George Lucas, who assembled the company to create visuals for his space opera that no one else could envision, was hospitalized during the postproduction of Star Wars due to stress-induced chest pains.Īmong their countless innovations, Industrial Light & Magic built new camera systems to create deep-space aerial dogfights.

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In the six-episode series debuting this week on Disney+, the men (and it was mostly men back then) work hard and play hard in a way that would give any modern HR rep a coronary. Unfortunately, the same wildness that made them so daring nearly caused the implosion of Star Wars when they were just starting out. The group of innovators who founded it forever altered the craft of moviemaking, creating entirely new ways of making the impossible look real.

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That’s what’s revealed in Light & Magic, the new docuseries from filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan, which tells the rough-and-tumble tale of a historic visual effects company known to anyone who has seen a big-budget movie over the past half-century. But in real life, they were a lot more like characters from Meatballs, Animal House, and Caddyshack. Industrial Light & Magic’s employees crafted otherworldly stories like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T.

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