Speaker 1: Weirding Way Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the Film Youmentaries podcast. This is
Speaker 2: Jamie Benning and this is episode one hundred and forty six,
Speaker 2: And in this one, I'm chatting to Don Bee's former
Speaker 2: Lucasfilm archivist and special effects artists who worked at Magic
Speaker 2: as well during his stay at Lucasfilm and during a
Speaker 2: pretty pivotal time. Actually, Don's story is a great one
Speaker 2: because it cuts across so many different corners of the
Speaker 2: lukesfilm world, from discovering filmmaking through classic monster movies to
Speaker 2: working on the fly, to becoming the guy responsible for
Speaker 2: digging through and in some cases saving the original Star
Speaker 2: Wars archive. We get into his early fascination with makeup effects,
Speaker 2: how he blagged his way into mechanical design, what it
Speaker 2: was like arriving in California in the mid eighties, and
Speaker 2: how a job that was supposed to last two weeks
Speaker 2: turned into ten years inside Lucasfilm. There are some brilliant
Speaker 2: stories in here, including finding a very rare Darth Vader
Speaker 2: helmet at the bottom of crate, listening to some original
Speaker 2: recordings of Irvin Kirshner on the set of the Empire Stracks,
Speaker 2: back working with Anthony Daniels and Peter Mayhew on commercials
Speaker 2: and even suiting up as a few characters for the
Speaker 2: special editions. So if you've ever wondered what it was
Speaker 2: like working at Lucasfilm during that time, this is a
Speaker 2: really fascinating look behind the curtain. So here's my conversation
Speaker 2: with Dombe's and I'll be back at the end for
Speaker 2: a bit more jabbering on. Don great to have you
Speaker 2: on the podcast. We had a few time, a few
Speaker 2: attempts at this, but we finally managed it. So I
Speaker 2: first became aware of you, as I'm sure many did,
Speaker 2: was and that was on the laser disc the tour
Speaker 2: of the archives, and I was like, who's this guy?
Speaker 3: How's he got that job?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 2: But I want to go all the way back. I
Speaker 2: believe you grew up in Chicago. I just want to
Speaker 2: kind of know how the sort of the film world
Speaker 2: was first brought to your attention when you were a kid.
Speaker 3: The earliest memory I have told story my my beginning
Speaker 3: in the film business was when I was six years
Speaker 3: old and a cousin, a much older cousin. I was
Speaker 3: the youngest of the kids. I was like, way younger
Speaker 3: than everybody else. She thought she'd tried to scare me
Speaker 3: by showing me the nineteen thirty one force Carlo Frankenstein
Speaker 3: and yeah, yeah, and uh and it did the exact opposite.
Speaker 3: I was enthralled with it, you know, and and and
Speaker 3: what what amazed me the most was was the makeup.
Speaker 3: You know, how did why does that guy look different?
Speaker 3: How did they do that?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 3: You know, I didn't understand any of it at that age,
Speaker 3: and you know, I would ask my mother and she
Speaker 3: would just say, well, it was makeup, and you know,
Speaker 3: and to me, makeup was you know what she put on,
Speaker 3: you know, yea lipstick and and stuff like that. So
Speaker 3: so I think she was the one that brought me home,
Speaker 3: found me a copy of a famous Monsters of film,
Speaker 3: you Phil y Ackerman's and and so that started my
Speaker 3: love not only of Frankenstein and and that, but also
Speaker 3: the film film world. And fortunately my mother was a
Speaker 3: huge uh and my father for that matter, but my
Speaker 3: mother more so was a huge film fan. So she
Speaker 3: they loved watching movies and we'd go to the cinema
Speaker 3: all the time. And I very my very first recollection
Speaker 3: was Mary Poppins saying Mary Poppins when it first opened,
Speaker 3: So I must have only been about four or five
Speaker 3: or something like that.
Speaker 2: And that's got a combination of so many things, and
Speaker 2: it hasn't it. I mean there's paintings, there's animation, it's musical.
Speaker 2: I mean there's it's quite an onslaught of a movie
Speaker 2: that as for a young kid, you kind of it's
Speaker 2: a fantastical world, isn't it too?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Absolutely? And and and that that started that love
Speaker 3: of fantasy films. And you know Ray Harryhausen and Willis
Speaker 3: O'Brien and you know John Chambers with Planting of the
Speaker 3: Apes that I became a huge plant of the Apes fan.
Speaker 3: I was really into Gorilla's you know, and Apes and
Speaker 3: everything because of those movies and anything that had that
Speaker 3: in it, you know, I would try to find and watch.
Speaker 3: And there was a show on Saturday nights in Chicago
Speaker 3: called Creature Features, which is so common in a lot
Speaker 3: of areas. They had their own versions of that and
Speaker 3: they would just show the old universal horror films. So
Speaker 3: I would, you know, bribe my parents to let me
Speaker 3: stay up, you know, because it started at like ten
Speaker 3: thirty at night and watch watch those movies. So again
Speaker 3: became an officianado of all the old universal horror films,
Speaker 3: and so it just was that was it and it
Speaker 3: and like I said, it sparked an interest in the process.
Speaker 3: So anytime there was like a behind the scenes or anything,
Speaker 3: you know, that might be on TV, because occasionally they
Speaker 3: did that, I would watch those and watch that art,
Speaker 3: you know, that how people were making the film itself.
Speaker 3: And so, like I said, it led along. The nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy seven was just a huge year for me because
Speaker 3: I had turned sixteen here in the United States, at
Speaker 3: least at that time, you could get your driver's license
Speaker 3: at sixteen, and I got my first job, and that
Speaker 3: all happened within a matter of months. And then of
Speaker 3: course Star Wars came out, and to.
Speaker 2: Know that it was coming by the way, had you
Speaker 2: they've been pressed building up to that in the magazines
Speaker 2: and things that you look, you.
Speaker 3: Know, I remember seeing the one thing I do remember
Speaker 3: seeing was the Time magazine that had although they got
Speaker 3: bumped from the from the front cover, but I remember
Speaker 3: seeing the Time magazine article. For some reason, we had
Speaker 3: a subscription of Time magazine. And then Starlog had their
Speaker 3: issue seven I believe it was, and that's when I
Speaker 3: became aware of Starlog. And then I do remember seeing
Speaker 3: a trailer or two on TV. But what got me
Speaker 3: interested in it was it had a big ape in it.
Speaker 3: Because I was in the apes, you know at that point,
Speaker 3: so it was Chewbacca. Right, It's like, well, I gotta
Speaker 3: go see this. It's got an ape in it, right,
Speaker 3: So so I went to see it and it just
Speaker 3: it knocked my socks off the.
Speaker 4: The you know.
Speaker 3: It was a very that evening. Was a couple of
Speaker 3: friends we went. We I didn't have access to a car,
Speaker 3: so we had to get driven there by friends of
Speaker 3: their family. And we we got to the screening that
Speaker 3: was I think it was supposed to be like a
Speaker 3: four thirty screening. We got at four fifteen while it
Speaker 3: was sold out by that point, you know, and the
Speaker 3: line was stretched around the around the theater, so we
Speaker 3: had to wait till the next screening, which was at
Speaker 3: six thirty or something like that. So, and it was
Speaker 3: a Sunday, I remember that very clearly. It was at
Speaker 3: a mall, and the mall was closed because it was Sunday,
Speaker 3: it closed early by that point, so we couldn't do anything,
Speaker 3: so we just hung out in the lobby and so
Speaker 3: then you know, we wait, didn'tuntil the movie came out.
Speaker 3: There was this onslaught of as as people we were
Speaker 3: trying to get into the theater and and you know,
Speaker 3: then it opened and I just wasn't, like I said,
Speaker 3: enthralled with with what I saw. And later that year,
Speaker 3: so that was I actually didn't see Star Wars. You know,
Speaker 3: right away it came out in May or so here.
Speaker 3: I didn't see it until there's there's probably July, late June,
Speaker 3: early July that I saw it. But later that year,
Speaker 3: in August, I was working this first job I got.
Speaker 3: I was working at an amusement park in Chicago, outside
Speaker 3: of Chicago, and it was an indoor amusement park. It
Speaker 3: was the first indoor amusement park, and it was called
Speaker 3: Old Chicago, and they had rides and you know, carnival
Speaker 3: rides and carnival games and everything. And I was one
Speaker 3: of the carnival game attendees and you know, I take
Speaker 3: the money and give you the balls to knock over
Speaker 3: the clowns and stuff. And they came to film a
Speaker 3: movie there. It was called The Fury, was Brian De
Speaker 3: Palma's movie with Andrew Stevens and Kirk Douglas and Amy Irving,
Speaker 3: and it was his follow up from Carrie, and so
Speaker 3: I had unfettered access to the to the work location
Speaker 3: because I was an employee either and so I would
Speaker 3: just follow around the crew, you know, I would just
Speaker 3: watch them film, and I particularly got really friendly with
Speaker 3: the effects crew because what they were going to do
Speaker 3: is in the in the course of the story, the
Speaker 3: Andrew Stevens plays this character with telekinetic abilities and he
Speaker 3: sees a bunch of Arabic men that because he blames
Speaker 3: them for kidnapping his father, killing his father, which didn't happen,
Speaker 3: but anyway, he has a vendetta against him, and they're
Speaker 3: they're on a ride and he puts the ride through
Speaker 3: a window of the restaurant, and so I got to
Speaker 3: watch them rig that I got to watch and the
Speaker 3: guy that actually was running was the head of the
Speaker 3: effects apartment, was a guy named A. D. Flowers, who
Speaker 3: apparently I think he went back to Wizard of Oz,
Speaker 3: but his more previous was uh uh. The credits had
Speaker 3: been Tiring, Inferno Beside and Adventure to to Tour, you know,
Speaker 3: all movies that I was like big fans of and yeah,
Speaker 3: and and like, wow, this is really cool. And then
Speaker 3: I got to watch because I was also in the
Speaker 3: makeup I want I saw that the makeup man was
Speaker 3: putting this on on Andrew Stevemens forehead, This throbbing vein appliance,
Speaker 3: which I found out much much later was either made
Speaker 3: by Dix. I think it was Dick Smith or Rick Baker,
Speaker 3: but I think it was Dick Dick Smith that that
Speaker 3: made the points. And I'm like, oh, you know, I
Speaker 3: got to so I got to meet that makeup artist
Speaker 3: and I found out later it was William Tuttle, who
Speaker 3: did Seven Faces of Doctor Lao and Time Machine and everything,
Speaker 3: so so I you know, I like, I was just like, okay,
Speaker 3: this seals that I got to do this kind of
Speaker 3: thing for the living. And that's that started that journey.
Speaker 2: So wow, that's the I mean, you didn't have a chance, really,
Speaker 2: did you. It was all coming at you from all angles.
Speaker 3: It was all fate. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was like yeah, yeah, But then how do you
Speaker 2: go from you know, being in Chicago, which isn't necessarily
Speaker 2: a big film town, to then getting into the film
Speaker 2: industry itself. I mean, you said you were interested in
Speaker 2: the makeups, and stuff. Were you making stuff yourself? Were
Speaker 2: you trying to make eight masks and things?
Speaker 3: Oh? Definitely, yeah, yeah, And I would any any like
Speaker 3: willing friend that would sit for me, you know, for
Speaker 3: my crude life casting or crude sculptures and stuff like.
Speaker 3: I remember one guy when I were taking the makeup
Speaker 3: off a lot, he lost part of his eyebrow. But yeah,
Speaker 3: it was just it was just experimenting with that stuff.
Speaker 3: Dick Smith had came out with a handbook I think
Speaker 3: it was published by the same publisher that did Famous
Speaker 3: Sponsors of film Land, and he came out with a
Speaker 3: handbook on how to do makeup with kind of things
Speaker 3: you could find around the house, more type of stuff,
Speaker 3: you know, gelatine and cotton and you know, you had
Speaker 3: to get some makeup supplies. But and so I played
Speaker 3: with all those and learned about, you know, where you
Speaker 3: can get fake hair and things like that. So I
Speaker 3: was definitely playing around with that. And yeah, you're right,
Speaker 3: Chicago didn't have much of a film scene at that point.
Speaker 3: And then so I got into a theater. I did
Speaker 3: the theater in high school, and then I got into
Speaker 3: community theater in Chicago, and did you know, started doing
Speaker 3: that kind of work and at least let out a
Speaker 3: creative side of me while I, you know, was trying
Speaker 3: to build up portfolios of stuff. And I did set
Speaker 3: design and did props, I did I did a little
Speaker 3: bit of acting, and you know, I did kind of everything.
Speaker 3: And and then my brother, who, like I said, is
Speaker 3: older than much older than me. He's a he's a
Speaker 3: pediatric surgeon. And he tells me this one day. He said,
Speaker 3: told me about this patient he had that whose son
Speaker 3: was really into makeup, and maybe we should get together.
Speaker 3: So I, you know, we connected. And his son's name
Speaker 3: is Keith Edmeyer. And Keith was this wonder kid of
Speaker 3: a sculptor, you know, he was. He had been corresponding
Speaker 3: with Dick Smith. He had been in touch. I think
Speaker 3: he went with Rick Baker at that point. And and
Speaker 3: so the two of us started doing projects together. He
Speaker 3: was still in high school, I was. He he's I
Speaker 3: guess he was about five or six years younger than me.
Speaker 3: So he was still in high school. So he had
Speaker 3: like a couple of high school projects that he was
Speaker 3: doing that I would help him out with. I remember,
Speaker 3: they did this really high value production of Jesus Christ
Speaker 3: Superstar and and we're you know, they were having blood
Speaker 3: effects and stuff. So it was it was, you know,
Speaker 3: we we got to do a lot of fun stuff together.
Speaker 3: And and then in uh we did a couple he
Speaker 3: helped me out with a couple of shows. We did
Speaker 3: a stage production of Frankenstein and he did the makeup
Speaker 3: for that, and and then he left to go work
Speaker 3: with Rick Baker down in Los Angeles, and and then
Speaker 3: he was down there a couple of years. I kept
Speaker 3: in touch with him, and then he when one of
Speaker 3: the times we were talking, he mentioned, oh, yeah, there's
Speaker 3: a company up in northern California that's looking for people.
Speaker 3: They're working on this remake of The Fly. And so
Speaker 3: I put my portfolio in, which at that point was
Speaker 3: just heavily makeup stuff. But the one thing I had
Speaker 3: done when I would when Star Wars came out was
Speaker 3: I made my own full size R two D two
Speaker 3: radio controlled R two.
Speaker 2: D two from the prints that you could get.
Speaker 3: No from I scaled up. I did have those, but
Speaker 3: that was only one elevation of R two or I
Speaker 3: had a couple only a couple of shots in there
Speaker 3: of that. But what it did have. What it did
Speaker 3: have was the model kit of our time, which wasn't
Speaker 3: I found out many years later it wasn't terribly accurate,
Speaker 3: but it's still was enough to you know, I figured, yeah,
Speaker 3: I guessed at what the scale would be roughly, and
Speaker 3: you know, did the math and you know, fixed it
Speaker 3: that did it that way. And so that was in
Speaker 3: my portfolio, just to you know, just to round out
Speaker 3: my portfolio. But my portfolio was, like I said, mainly
Speaker 3: makeup heavy. And so the company was Chris Wayliss Incorporated
Speaker 3: c w I and Chris you know, I sent my
Speaker 3: portfolio in and you know, here I thought I was
Speaker 3: going to be the next great makeup artist, you know,
Speaker 3: up there with Dick Smith and Rick Baker and all that.
Speaker 3: And and he wasn't interested in my sculptures or makeup
Speaker 3: at all, he says, But he says, I see this,
Speaker 3: uh r two D two you did? He says, so
Speaker 3: you do mechanical design, and and I already knew at
Speaker 3: that point just say yes, you know, yeah, sure, yeah
Speaker 3: you know, and and he he says, oh yeah, I
Speaker 3: said yeah, yeah, oh yeah, yeah I do yeah, And
Speaker 3: at which I kind of did. I mean, I did,
Speaker 3: you know, had to learn all that stuff for to
Speaker 3: make it art two.
Speaker 2: But you're like twenty this.
Speaker 3: I was twenty four.
Speaker 2: I think it was okay, it was. Yeah, it was
Speaker 2: sort of early eighties, wasn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, And and so uh he said, uh, he says,
Speaker 3: so you know how to use a mill and a lathe?
Speaker 3: And I said yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, And I didn't
Speaker 3: know what a mill was. I knew what a lathe was,
Speaker 3: but I didn't know what a mill was. And so
Speaker 3: a week or so goes by, and then I got
Speaker 3: a call saying they wanted me to start on such
Speaker 3: and such a day. So I packed up everything, moved
Speaker 3: out to California, and and and then they've been out
Speaker 3: here ever since. So yeah, so I started on the
Speaker 3: Fly and again doing mechanical design, and that's that's kind
Speaker 3: of how I get it. And then you know, you
Speaker 3: meet people, you know, yeah, it was only fly up
Speaker 3: Perio at that time. It was a small community.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, So on the Fly then described to me
Speaker 2: a particular sequence or shot you worked on that.
Speaker 3: Well, it's funny because a lot of yeah, a lot
Speaker 3: of the stuff I've initially worked on was all stuff
Speaker 3: that got cut. It's in the special edition DVDs and
Speaker 3: stuff like that. But there was a sequence there was
Speaker 3: a special edition. I didn't think, yeah, well that's it's
Speaker 3: it's it's like the Blu ray that had all the
Speaker 3: cut scenes in it, and right, not so much a
Speaker 3: special edition, but it has the cuts. There's a sequence
Speaker 3: where he tries to reverse the results of the fly
Speaker 3: and he takes a cat and an ape and puts
Speaker 3: them in and blends them together, and with the idea
Speaker 3: that he would unblend them. And so we made this
Speaker 3: monkey cat. We call the monkey Cat puppet. So I
Speaker 3: made that. I worked on that. I made, well, there
Speaker 3: were two versions of it. There was the free the
Speaker 3: one that like wobbled across the floor, pulled on the string,
Speaker 3: it looked like it was running. That's the one I
Speaker 3: mainly worked on. Then there was another one that was
Speaker 3: more animatronic, that had articulated faces and stuff, and I
Speaker 3: worked a little bit on that one, but I mainly
Speaker 3: worked on the other one. And then after that, he
Speaker 3: beats the really brutal. He beats the thing to death
Speaker 3: with a stick, which the hands were David Kronerberg's hands
Speaker 3: when he beat it. And then Brundle is distraught because
Speaker 3: it wasn't working. So he climbs up on the roof
Speaker 3: and there's this remnant of this scene that's still in
Speaker 3: the film where he keeps scratching his side. He's constantly
Speaker 3: doing this in the film, and it turns out when
Speaker 3: he gets to the roof and he's looking over the
Speaker 3: city and everything, it's starting to bother him more and more.
Speaker 3: And a little fly arm pops out. So I made that.
Speaker 3: I made the fly arm that comes off, and then
Speaker 3: he gnaws it off with his mouth, and then and
Speaker 3: he throws it aside and it twitches, so that again,
Speaker 3: that was something else I made. And uh, and then
Speaker 3: at the end he he has uh he the the
Speaker 3: the other guys staff is I think it is. He
Speaker 3: does the fly vomit and this, and and acid eats
Speaker 3: his uh, his foot and he a tone comes out
Speaker 3: and he slurps that up. I made the tongue that
Speaker 3: that came out. So that's all the stuff that didn't
Speaker 3: make it in the film. And then oh, and then
Speaker 3: there was actually a stop motion sequence that I worked
Speaker 3: on that we did after film shot, which I can
Speaker 3: get into. But the the thing that I did work
Speaker 3: on that did make it into the film is a
Speaker 3: big thing. He turns into at the end. And so
Speaker 3: there was a there's a group of us led by
Speaker 3: John Berg, who did the Walkers from Empire Strikes Back,
Speaker 3: who is to this day. He was a mentor at
Speaker 3: that time and then he's become Yeah, he's a really
Speaker 3: good friend of mine, you know. And uh and we
Speaker 3: we we've stayed in touch all these years, and I
Speaker 3: just talked to him a couple of weeks ago. But
Speaker 3: John and I and a few other people worked on that,
Speaker 3: so we got to do all this mechanical design. John
Speaker 3: ended upuppetearing on said, I didn't go to location. It
Speaker 3: was shot in Toronto, but I helped John with all
Speaker 3: that stuff. And then there was walking legs. There was
Speaker 3: a shot you know where these legs were walking. I
Speaker 3: helped build those. But then, like I said, the movie
Speaker 3: was finished rapping and there was a sequence at the
Speaker 3: end of the film that that they were trying to
Speaker 3: figure out how to do, and they decided to stop motion.
Speaker 3: And what the sequence was is that Geena Davis wakes
Speaker 3: up from a from a dream, you know, shot like
Speaker 3: a nightmare, and she sits up right. And again this
Speaker 3: is on all these cut scenes that you can see
Speaker 3: these uh, and she wakes bolts up upright from this dream,
Speaker 3: and and and the guy laying next to his status,
Speaker 3: the guy that got his hand in his foot melted,
Speaker 3: and and she's obviously pregnant. She's really obviously pregnant. And
Speaker 3: and he's like, what's wrong. She's I had that dream
Speaker 3: again and about the baby, you know, the maggot baby
Speaker 3: that she had earlier in the film. And he says, well,
Speaker 3: don't worry, you know, we that we got rid of
Speaker 3: that baby. This one's ours or something. So she lays
Speaker 3: back down, closes her eyes, and then the camera flies along,
Speaker 3: and in the distance is a branch with a cocoon
Speaker 3: hanging down. A crystalis hanging down from it, and the fly.
Speaker 3: The camera flies along and and comes up onto the
Speaker 3: cocoon and the cocoon and shakes and breaks, and the
Speaker 3: sides split off, and these butterfly wings unfolding its human
Speaker 3: baby with butterfly wings, and it crawls up to the
Speaker 3: top of the branch and you know, kind of dries
Speaker 3: its wings, flaps its wings and dries and and then
Speaker 3: dives off and flies off and and and the camera
Speaker 3: and fade out. And that was how the original movie
Speaker 3: was supposed to endow, and so they they decided to
Speaker 3: do it stop motion, and on Berg being a stop
Speaker 3: motion animator, he was, he was, and he wasn't up
Speaker 3: for it. Uh, he went not so much. He wasn't
Speaker 3: up for it. He he had kind of given up
Speaker 3: stop motion after after Empire Strikes Back. It had taken
Speaker 3: so much out of him, and you know, he he
Speaker 3: just like he was not at a place where he
Speaker 3: really wanted to do something like this, but out of
Speaker 3: deference to his good friendship with Chris Wayliss and everything,
Speaker 3: he agreed to do it. So he needed a couple of,
Speaker 3: you know, a few people assisted obviously making the puppet
Speaker 3: and everything. But I built the branch shot of steel
Speaker 3: pipe and and we covered it with latex and make
Speaker 3: it look like branch, you know, bark. And and then
Speaker 3: he asked me to be on set with him as
Speaker 3: a as a you know, not so much an animator,
Speaker 3: but you know, just assistant. And so I was. I
Speaker 3: was on set with him with another stop motion animator,
Speaker 3: Tony Liddatti, and and yeah, and we shot this thing.
Speaker 3: And it was a real compressed schedule because the movie
Speaker 3: was going to be coming out. It seemed to recall.
Speaker 3: We shut this like April. Move was coming out in
Speaker 3: August or something like that, and we had to do
Speaker 3: it very quickly. We had no time. We put in
Speaker 3: a thirty two hour day to do the first take
Speaker 3: of one of these shots, and like at two three
Speaker 3: o'clock in the morning, we were really punchy. John and
Speaker 3: I were the only ones that were still awake, really,
Speaker 3: because each each frame took about twenty minutes for John
Speaker 3: to with all the wires of the thing, and we
Speaker 3: would just get the giggles and it was just you know,
Speaker 3: the camera operator, John Gaza, he was a camera operator.
Speaker 3: He would you'd see him sleeping over by the side
Speaker 3: and then John said, okay, ready, and John would wake
Speaker 3: up and say shooting and press the button and then
Speaker 3: go back to sleep again and goodness. And so it
Speaker 3: was this real peal to get it done and it
Speaker 3: got finished, and then it was decided it was cut.
Speaker 3: And I don't think it was cut from so much
Speaker 3: a technical reason, but it just wasn't totally right for
Speaker 3: the film, you know it is. John will even admit,
Speaker 3: you know, it's kind of rough animation. It didn't fit
Speaker 3: with the realism of the movie because we were really
Speaker 3: pressed for time, but.
Speaker 2: So you went too fuss that it was removed.
Speaker 3: Well, I always wanted to see it, and I didn't
Speaker 3: get to see it for years. I saw the rushes,
Speaker 3: you know, I saw the rushes at the time, but
Speaker 3: I never got to see the sequence because it was
Speaker 3: never released, you know, until one of the DVDs came
Speaker 3: out and it's like.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, right, yeah, so thank goodness for DVD. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so what came after that?
Speaker 3: Then?
Speaker 2: I mean that that's quite a big movie to be
Speaker 2: a part of. I mean that must have felt pretty good,
Speaker 2: A good and a good reference on your resume.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well yeah, it's yeah, it won an a came
Speaker 3: Award and it's a bit downhill ever since. Uh yeah,
Speaker 3: I'd forgot about that. Yeah yeah that Chris and Stefan
Speaker 3: Dupui won Caamy Award for the makeup on it. Uh
Speaker 3: so you know that. Yeah, that ended up being only
Speaker 3: I like, I started started in November of eighty five,
Speaker 3: and I think we were finished with that's thought motion
Speaker 3: sequence in April or something. There was a period like
Speaker 3: a month or so where there was no work until
Speaker 3: we came back to that, and so it was the
Speaker 3: six months of work really and so then it was
Speaker 3: a matter of trying to make connections in northern California
Speaker 3: and find other work. I was, of course trying to
Speaker 3: get into ILM at that point. John was trying to
Speaker 3: help by, you know, making introductions and that, but you
Speaker 3: know that was working. So I was working at another
Speaker 3: company that did like Christmas window design, set design. I
Speaker 3: was I was acting as a draftsman and a carpenter
Speaker 3: and building things for them. And through that connection, one
Speaker 3: of the Christmas, the Christmas windows stuff, I would help
Speaker 3: do some mechanical design of making the things move. And
Speaker 3: this guy named David Schaefer who was an electronics engineer.
Speaker 3: He I met him and he was doing all the
Speaker 3: you know, interfacing with repeatability, and at that point it
Speaker 3: was literally like the old Disney stuff. It was audio
Speaker 3: and amtronics. He was using a code on a cassette
Speaker 3: tape running you know, running an electronic device that would
Speaker 3: be able to repeat functions and stuff. It was quite
Speaker 3: clever at the time, but you know, it was all
Speaker 3: stuff that he had to create. So a very very
Speaker 3: clever guy. But one of the other gigs that he
Speaker 3: had was he worked as the R two D two
Speaker 3: operator for Lucasfilm for special events and special appearances and so,
Speaker 3: so we got to be friends, and he knew of
Speaker 3: the R two that I made and everything. And then
Speaker 3: in nineteen eighty seven he went down to Disney for
Speaker 3: the opening of Star Tours and while he was down there,
Speaker 3: he made connections at Imagineering and they he got a job. Essentially,
Speaker 3: they offered him a job at Imagineering. So left a
Speaker 3: hole for somebody to fill for the R two D
Speaker 3: two appearances, and it just so happened. In eighty seven,
Speaker 3: Lucasfilm signed a deal with Panasonic of Japan. Yeah, the
Speaker 3: commercials to do the commercials. Yeah, so and and feature
Speaker 3: George and all the Star Wars characters. So yeah, it
Speaker 3: would Daniels, Peter Mayhew as well. And then yeah, my
Speaker 3: very first an set was with Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew,
Speaker 3: George Lucas, uh, some of the Ewoks that were originally
Speaker 3: it's not work Wark Davis wasn't there, but some of
Speaker 3: the local northern California and uh, yeah it was. It
Speaker 3: was quite a auspicious first day, you know.
Speaker 2: And did you take a moment to just kind of look, Oh,
Speaker 2: I was.
Speaker 3: Like, you know, like you know, it was funny at ILM.
Speaker 3: It was kind of frowned upon to be a fan.
Speaker 3: You know, you couldn't be a fan, and you know,
Speaker 3: really it wasn't it wasn't like a spoken thing, but
Speaker 3: you know, you know you could tell the old timers
Speaker 3: were Liken nerds, you know and everything. So you know,
Speaker 3: all those years I had died my my fandom, and
Speaker 3: you know, getting getting to do that kind of stuff
Speaker 3: was just like, you know, a dream come true. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so yeah, I did these commercials and I met Anthony,
Speaker 3: and Anthony became a good friend and and you know
Speaker 3: it continued doing a bunch of appearances over the years
Speaker 3: with with him. And did you shoot he was in
Speaker 3: Japan or they shot? No, we shot, well, we shot
Speaker 3: most of them in northern California here because the ones
Speaker 3: with George, he didn't want to go anywhere for so
Speaker 3: we shot them in at il M. A couple one
Speaker 3: of them actually, I don't know how well you know them,
Speaker 3: but there's one where they're all out in the field,
Speaker 3: all the Star Wars characters are in the field and
Speaker 3: George walks up. That's right down the road from Skywalker Ranch.
Speaker 3: It's a there's a reservoir called the Nicasio Reservoir and
Speaker 3: it's right across the street from there. And what was
Speaker 3: ironic about it was we were shooting it in late
Speaker 3: August or something of eighty seven. It was almost ten
Speaker 3: years to the day that I was doing that shoot
Speaker 3: in Chicago with you know where where this it all started.
Speaker 3: So yeah, it was for me, it was like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is kind of neat, you know this this time
Speaker 3: it worked out, so yeah, So from that I started,
Speaker 3: I made the connection with Lucasfilm to do uh the commercials,
Speaker 3: and I think we we Oh the other place we
Speaker 3: shot was we did went down to La to shoot
Speaker 3: a couple of them and went down there with Peter
Speaker 3: Mayhew and against some of the Ewoks and we shot
Speaker 3: some stuff and George wasn't in those.
Speaker 2: And that was the one with the There was one
Speaker 2: with the like a jamb of the hot animated jamb
Speaker 2: of the hot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that we shot that. Yeah, we shot that at Island. Yeah,
Speaker 3: where he was crying to like a Ray Charles blues tune.
Speaker 2: Yeah, such a weird ad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And yeah, they're all are bizarre. They're all really bizarre. There.
Speaker 3: That one was it was like a half scale Jaba
Speaker 3: that was made.
Speaker 2: I've seen it the exhibition that traveled over to the
Speaker 2: London as well. Always I wondered for years what that
Speaker 2: was from. And then just a few years ago I
Speaker 2: saw it online that yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and and uh yeah, Tony Hudson is a sculptor
Speaker 3: that that did that, and and he puppeteered that, I
Speaker 3: believe too. And yeah, they wanted job and job of
Speaker 3: course by that point was long gone. They had the eyes,
Speaker 3: the eyes and the arms of Jaba at the archives,
Speaker 3: but ye, but that's all they have. And that's when
Speaker 3: when I realized that Jaba has a tattoo. Yeah, he
Speaker 3: has a tattoo on his arm. So anyway, the yeah,
Speaker 3: we we we did a whole bunch of those up
Speaker 3: here and then we I think it was for the
Speaker 3: next three or six years that occasionally they would pop up.
Speaker 3: They introduced their own mascot called Sparky, and the Ilum
Speaker 3: Creature Shop built that and we shot that with George
Speaker 3: and R two and and Sparky and and it was
Speaker 3: like watching a I don't know, like a Model T
Speaker 3: with R two and then this Lamborghini with Sparky because
Speaker 3: Artie was Yeah, we used all the original arties, all
Speaker 3: the original even into the prequels, we used the original arties.
Speaker 2: Were you modifying the costumes a tool? Because I know
Speaker 2: for Anthony particularly, it was a very uncomfortable Yeah. He
Speaker 2: was always complained.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, Actually the only thing so when we jumping
Speaker 3: ahead to the prequels, uh, you know, episode one was
Speaker 3: a puppet ofc repeo. Episode two was the multi colored one,
Speaker 3: which was actually an Empire Strikes Back era costume we
Speaker 3: just painted. So that was that was one of his
Speaker 3: costumes and we didn't do any modifications to that. But
Speaker 3: on episode three again we used an Empire era costume
Speaker 3: and it was all the gold plating again, and we
Speaker 3: we took two of the costumes and cleaned it up
Speaker 3: and replated it. And for that, he was always complaining
Speaker 3: that because you know, his body while he was still
Speaker 3: amazingly fit for being in a costume thirty years later, yeah,
Speaker 3: he you know, your body still naturally SAgs, you know,
Speaker 3: in places that you don't expect, and so things didn't
Speaker 3: fit him quite exactly the same. And he around the throat,
Speaker 3: there's a there's this like piece that goes around the throat,
Speaker 3: piece of plastic, and so he was always complaining that
Speaker 3: I was rubbing against his Adam's apple, So I made it.
Speaker 3: I pushed the points a little bit more forward, and
Speaker 3: I carved out the mask a little bit to give
Speaker 3: him a little more air there. And then also the plate,
Speaker 3: the big round thing on his tour so in the
Speaker 3: you know, if you look at it from a profile,
Speaker 3: the it all it kind of dug in this way
Speaker 3: at the very bottom, so we popped it out so
Speaker 3: that it wouldn't beg into him. Plus then the wire
Speaker 3: corset that he wore, the original one with some sort
Speaker 3: of cast It was like latex or something cast onto
Speaker 3: spandex with real wires on it. I found a source
Speaker 3: where there were like silicon wires that we used, and
Speaker 3: we made a silicon rubber base that everything was tied
Speaker 3: to and nothing at a little Pokey's or anything. And
Speaker 3: you know, we tried to make that as comfortable as possible.
Speaker 3: But still the majority of it was still the original suit.
Speaker 3: I don't don't think it was until The Force Awakens
Speaker 3: that he got a proper news suit.
Speaker 2: What about the Chewbacca suit, because that, I mean that
Speaker 2: couldn't have survived too well.
Speaker 3: The survivor Tribacca suit. We used that as a personal
Speaker 3: appearance cost in the original suits, I think they're probably well,
Speaker 3: they're probably were cleaned up a bit for Return of
Speaker 3: the Jedi, but we use those up until the nineties
Speaker 3: for Peter. Really yeah, it wasn't again, It wasn't until
Speaker 3: episode two that he got the new suits made by
Speaker 3: the Dave Elsie David Leeuwelson, a creature shop in Sydney,
Speaker 3: and then I did a personal appearance with well, it
Speaker 3: was a series of marketing appearances with Peter in in
Speaker 3: when episode three was coming out in two thousand and five,
Speaker 3: and we used the new suits for that. But Peter
Speaker 3: actually liked the old suits.
Speaker 2: Better, really yeah.
Speaker 3: Because the new suit, the mask in particular, was had
Speaker 3: animatronics in it, which they ended up not using a
Speaker 3: whole lot of, but it had servos in its head
Speaker 3: and everything, you know, the originals. The original mask didn't
Speaker 3: have any of that. It was all operated by Peter
Speaker 3: opening his mouth. Yeah. And also his original suit was
Speaker 3: simply he wore a big jump uh you know, leotard
Speaker 3: and then he wore this mohair sweater you know, jumper
Speaker 3: basically all over that and and that was it. Whereas
Speaker 3: the the newer suit had a muscle, a little bit
Speaker 3: of a muscle suit underneath it, right, Okay, Yeah, so
Speaker 3: I think the original suit was a little more comfortable.
Speaker 3: Was comfortable with that kind of thing can be, but yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a little bit more comfort.
Speaker 2: Imagine spending hours in those things. But it seems that
Speaker 2: you joined Lucasfilm at a really interesting time though, because
Speaker 2: it was kind of post Star Wars when they were
Speaker 2: really kind of you know, growing as a company. They
Speaker 2: were you know, putting out tendering for particular jobs. You know,
Speaker 2: they were putting bids in for particular effects work at
Speaker 2: ILM and Skywalker Sound, and then there was LucasArts and
Speaker 2: Lucas Education all that stuff. It seemed like the company
Speaker 2: was getting bigger. So an interesting time to be there.
Speaker 3: Yeah. They It was funny because they kept then changing
Speaker 3: their name and sometimes we were working for Lucasfilm, then
Speaker 3: we were working for Lucas Arts. You know, my check
Speaker 3: kept changing.
Speaker 2: Who I was worked different budgets.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, basically, Yeah, what happened after I got
Speaker 3: that connection in with with the commercials, the Panasonic commercials.
Speaker 3: Judy Nails, who had hired me for the commercial, she
Speaker 3: was running the other special event things. And so she
Speaker 3: she and a guy named David Craig, who was the
Speaker 3: very first archives so Lucasfilm arcoves. He was actually worked
Speaker 3: for the PR department, but he, you know, he would
Speaker 3: do the press releases and everything with Lynn Hale who
Speaker 3: was who had just started at the time as well.
Speaker 3: But David and Judy did all these So they put
Speaker 3: on the just prior to my time, they put on
Speaker 3: the tenth anniversary celebration in Los Angeles, and so they
Speaker 3: were always putting on like these little events. So because
Speaker 3: of that, I was constantly getting doing you know, R
Speaker 3: two goes to an event in San Francisco, you know,
Speaker 3: for some children's thing or whatever. And then in nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty eight, Marin County, where Lucasfilm is based had been
Speaker 3: had been there was a board of supervisors that were
Speaker 3: kind of against the expansion of Skywalker Ranch because Georgia
Speaker 3: wanted to move I ALM into an adjoining ranch that
Speaker 3: he owned and joining property that he owned to Skywalker Ranch,
Speaker 3: and and they were kind of against the expansion of
Speaker 3: the ranch. And so George. Ever since George had moved
Speaker 3: back to the Northern California, the Marine County Fair, which
Speaker 3: happened over the Fourth of July weekend. Every year was
Speaker 3: always courting George to come and do something, have something
Speaker 3: happened from the representing Lucasfilm at this County Fair. He always,
Speaker 3: you know, he wasn't interested. But this year because of
Speaker 3: all the not so much negative press, but because of
Speaker 3: the fact that he wanted to get more of the
Speaker 3: public at least this is my opinion, but he wanted
Speaker 3: to get more of the public back on his side
Speaker 3: to support his expansion plans. He offered to have an
Speaker 3: exhibition at the Allowden. Exhibition happened at the Marine County Fair.
Speaker 3: So it was the first exhibition of all the Star
Speaker 3: Wars Indiana Jones and at that point Willow and Tucker
Speaker 3: Edge was just coming out memorabilia at this County Fair.
Speaker 3: So it was very well publicized that, you know, to
Speaker 3: get into the fair was something like ten dollars or
Speaker 3: something and that was then free to get everywhere else.
Speaker 3: We had forty three thousand people come in over four
Speaker 3: days and literally from all over the world. We had,
Speaker 3: I know, there was a fan from Germany that flew
Speaker 3: in just to see the stuff, and so we had
Speaker 3: we had all the original model or not all, but
Speaker 3: a lot of the original models. And I helped Judy
Speaker 3: and David put this together, so we had original models costumes. Unfortunately,
Speaker 3: Indiana Jones, they were shooting Last Crusade in the UK
Speaker 3: and elsewhere, so that we didn't have a lot of stuff.
Speaker 3: I think we had we had might have had one
Speaker 3: jacket and hat or something like that. We had the
Speaker 3: Ark of the Covenant and that sort of thing. But
Speaker 3: we had the painting from the end of Raiders up
Speaker 3: as well. So but it was really heavily Star Wars
Speaker 3: and like I said, and also Willow and Tucker. We
Speaker 3: had an actual Tucker automobile that George Jones. So we
Speaker 3: had this incredibly successful exhibition of over four days. People
Speaker 3: were the line. You know, it was a two or
Speaker 3: three hour wait in the summer heat to get in
Speaker 3: and we fire department would only allow so many people
Speaker 3: in at a time, so we had to you know,
Speaker 3: keep keep the crowd flowing. And and after that, then
Speaker 3: all of a sudden, then Lucasfilm's like, hm, maybe the
Speaker 3: stuff sitting in the warehouse is an asset that we
Speaker 3: can exploit. So they hired me to clean out the
Speaker 3: archives after that for two weeks and I ended up
Speaker 3: staying for seven years or something like that. What kind
Speaker 3: of state was it in, Well, it was just storage,
Speaker 3: you know. It was just a warehouse of things just
Speaker 3: toward and they really didn't know what they had because
Speaker 3: it was kind of like they finished it put it
Speaker 3: in the warehouse, you know. So so my job was
Speaker 3: to kind of go through everything, and I unofficially and
Speaker 3: then officially became the Lucasfilm Archive. It's actually the second
Speaker 3: the technically the second one, because David was the first one.
Speaker 3: So I started, I researched what, you know, what I
Speaker 3: should be doing, the proper way of doing things, and
Speaker 3: I got a bunch of information and research on restoration
Speaker 3: and conservation and also ac sessioning, you know, like how
Speaker 3: a museum sessions of piece and David had started some
Speaker 3: of that, but I convinced them to buy a computer
Speaker 3: and I learned how to make a database so that
Speaker 3: I could create a database of a sessioning software, which
Speaker 3: while there were things like that at the time, I
Speaker 3: just wanted something custom plus I want to learn a
Speaker 3: new skill. So so yeah, so I started going through things.
Speaker 3: You know, there was a lot of boxes of of memorabile,
Speaker 3: not memorabilley, but like give people the departments just use
Speaker 3: it as a dumping ground kind of.
Speaker 2: So there was like stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there was like these whole boxes of like
Speaker 3: from legal department, you know. So I'd be going through
Speaker 3: them and finding cease and desist letters for people dressing
Speaker 3: up as Darth Vader at the local supermarket opening and
Speaker 3: and things like that. And one of the more fascinating
Speaker 3: ones was Alan Arnold did the making Once upon a Galaxy,
Speaker 3: the making them. Yeah, and I found the original manuscript
Speaker 3: for that, and and absolutely and and what was not
Speaker 3: in it was even cool because he was What was
Speaker 3: interesting is you know Alan Arnold is I'm sure you
Speaker 3: know it was was a well respected journalist, and he
Speaker 3: was not used to anybody editing him apparently because the
Speaker 3: there was there was again you'd I'd look through this
Speaker 3: whole manuscript, original type written manuscript, and there'd be like
Speaker 3: big sections with you know, crossed out. A lot of
Speaker 3: it had to do with Carrie Fisher and her tendency
Speaker 3: to miss shooting days because of her her addiction issues.
Speaker 5: And.
Speaker 3: So they they they while it was pretty much, you know,
Speaker 3: a very truthful account of all of all this stuff.
Speaker 3: It was also they wanted to protect, you know, certain people. So,
Speaker 3: like I said, Carrie was the one that seemed to
Speaker 3: get the most editing. And and but there was a
Speaker 3: series of letters that went back and forth between Alan
Speaker 3: and his agent, his agent Lucasfilm, Alan and Lucasfilm that
Speaker 3: were like not so much not with these words exactly,
Speaker 3: but kind of how dare you dit me? You know, yeah,
Speaker 3: and uh and you know, trying to justify the need
Speaker 3: for those sorts of things. Well, Lucasfilm went out because
Speaker 3: or you know, del Ray, whoever it was that published
Speaker 3: it one went out because they had the rights to
Speaker 3: do whatever they wanted.
Speaker 2: So despite all that redaction, like, it's still quite uh,
Speaker 2: you know, a full on account of making a movie,
Speaker 2: isn't it, because it includes that stuff between Harrison and
Speaker 2: Carrie and the arguments they had with and He's coming
Speaker 2: He's coming up with lines and I'm not allowed to
Speaker 2: come up with lines.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And I had also found the original tapes that
Speaker 3: he had of those converses, and so I would put
Speaker 3: them on and listen to them because I was so
Speaker 3: familiar with that book. Again, for me, it was it
Speaker 3: was an amazing book. It was probably the best of
Speaker 3: the best books ever on the making of a production, definitely,
Speaker 3: And I remember particularly this that I think the one
Speaker 3: you're talking about was, uh was they put a microphone
Speaker 3: on on Irvin Kershner and and one day when they're
Speaker 3: shooting in the carbon freezing chamber and uh and and
Speaker 3: you know, there it's basically like six hours of of Kurshner,
Speaker 3: you know, just converse, converse with everybody. So I put
Speaker 3: these tapes on and listen to them in the background
Speaker 3: while I was doing stuff, and it was fascinating. You know,
Speaker 3: there's a one in particular where and it's part of
Speaker 3: it's in the book where Mark Hamill. It was towards
Speaker 3: the end of filming and Mark Hamill was talking about
Speaker 3: I guess he made some joke that wasn't like received
Speaker 3: well by the by Kirshner or something or maybe it
Speaker 3: was the UK crew, I can't remember, and it was
Speaker 3: kind of like there was a friction between some people
Speaker 3: and he's he's addressing it in there, and so it
Speaker 3: was it was a real fascinating insight into the making
Speaker 3: of that. And there's a whole story that goes with
Speaker 3: that too, because when we were I eventually, like I said,
Speaker 3: I was Lucas from Mark Ives, and so I was
Speaker 3: able to jump between my work as a model maker
Speaker 3: and the stuff that eventually did at ILM. And in
Speaker 3: between those jobs, I was able to go back to
Speaker 3: the archives, which was which was a nice, a nice gig,
Speaker 3: and I eventually helped move the stuff to the to
Speaker 3: the to the to the ranch. But my dictate at
Speaker 3: the time, the lady that was running the archives, or
Speaker 3: was in charge of the archives technically my supervisor, was
Speaker 3: a lady named Debbie Fine, who was the head researcher
Speaker 3: at Lucasfilm at the time. And she basically wanted she says,
Speaker 3: just get rid of stuff, you know, just dump them,
Speaker 3: just get rid of it. And and I didn't really
Speaker 3: want to. I mean, I recognized the I recognized the
Speaker 3: the historical value of some of the stuff. Some of
Speaker 3: the things were like for legal department, is that I'll
Speaker 3: just send it back to legal. Well I found out
Speaker 3: later that they threw these things away, you know, they
Speaker 3: destroyed them. So so I don't know whatever happened to
Speaker 3: that original manuscript it might have that might have been
Speaker 3: I'm sure, I'm sure it was destroyed. But these tapes.
Speaker 3: It's like, oh, these tapes are so so she wanted
Speaker 3: me to get rid of I took them home, you know,
Speaker 3: I figured I'll just take them home. It's the only
Speaker 3: thing I ever took home, you know, from the archives.
Speaker 3: And and so I took him home. And then years later,
Speaker 3: Uh Jonathan, oh gosh, I can't remember his last name,
Speaker 3: who was making writing the making of Star Wars Empire
Speaker 3: and Jedi uh Wrinsler. Jonathan Uh and I were talking
Speaker 3: and I think he had just come out with the
Speaker 3: making of Star Wars. He had he knew my experience
Speaker 3: with the archives and everything. And we were talking and
Speaker 3: and I said, yeah, I said, you know the the
Speaker 3: there Alan Arnold did these series of interviews. I said,
Speaker 3: I have the tapes. He says, you do, I said,
Speaker 3: I said yeah. I said do you want to do
Speaker 3: you want to listen to him?
Speaker 2: And he goes yes.
Speaker 3: I said, well, can I get him back, you know,
Speaker 3: I because I mean, they're they're not you know, Lucasfilm
Speaker 3: told me to get rid of them. So uh so
Speaker 3: he says yeah, he said, well, we'll transcribe them and
Speaker 3: get them back to you. Well, they I gave him
Speaker 3: to him. They transcribed him. I never got him back,
Speaker 3: but but he did. He did use them in uh
Speaker 3: in the thing and uh in the making of Empire
Speaker 3: strikes back.
Speaker 2: Very cool. I just thought, have him imagine you though,
Speaker 2: in that archive of like a crowbar opening a box
Speaker 2: and like, what's going to be in here today? Were
Speaker 2: there any physical items that you were surprised to find,
Speaker 2: like not just e femera, but like props or absolutely?
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. One of the ones was again there were
Speaker 3: there were lots of crates of stuff, and a lot
Speaker 3: of this stuff was the crates that they shipped stuff
Speaker 3: over to London, particularly creature stuff that because they made
Speaker 3: all the creatures in California ship them to London for
Speaker 3: shooting and then, which.
Speaker 2: You can see in those documentaries. Yeah, you could see that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And we had those crates, right, and
Speaker 3: and so I would open a crate and see what's
Speaker 3: in it, and and you know, I'd take out as
Speaker 3: much of stuff. Well, there was one like one particular
Speaker 3: crate there was relatively large. You know, it was like
Speaker 3: I couldn't reach down, I had to climb into it
Speaker 3: and it just had you know, paper and bubble wrap
Speaker 3: and stuff like that looked it looked relatively empty. It
Speaker 3: looked like it just had garbage in the bottom of it,
Speaker 3: and so I figured, I bet I better, you know,
Speaker 3: search through it. So I looked through it, and in
Speaker 3: there was this like a and flannel bag, like a
Speaker 3: pillowcase basically, and I opened it up and it was
Speaker 3: the mass that they pull off a vader at the
Speaker 3: end of Return to the Jedi, and and it was
Speaker 3: just in the bottom of this this crate. And I
Speaker 3: almost threw the crate away. So so, yeah, that that
Speaker 3: was the one big surprise. I mean, there were there
Speaker 3: were other things that were like I'd find something, it's
Speaker 3: like what, you know, what the heck is it? So
Speaker 3: I go and watch the VHS tape of stuff and
Speaker 3: and try to place it in the film and and
Speaker 3: occasionally find it, you know. But yeah, there there was
Speaker 3: a few a few surprises like that.
Speaker 2: The photo archives in there as well.
Speaker 3: There, so when we yeah, when we moved to the ranch,
Speaker 3: the ranch, the archive building originally was just there. There's
Speaker 3: now two buildings there, but originally it was one building
Speaker 3: with the intention of having the second building, but the
Speaker 3: model prop costume archives the second floor and on the
Speaker 3: first floor was the film archives. They also had George
Speaker 3: had bought the Paramount Library Research Library, which was a
Speaker 3: series of books and not only books but for research,
Speaker 3: but also file cabinets full of like documents and everything
Speaker 3: again for research for making films. It's not it wasn't
Speaker 3: like about Paramount per se. But it was like, oh,
Speaker 3: here's pictures from the Civil War, you know, and there
Speaker 3: would be images of that, or there was like I
Speaker 3: remember finding looking in and finding like bonds from you know,
Speaker 3: years before money, you know, like money from the eighteen
Speaker 3: hundreds and things like that, and so they would have
Speaker 3: all this stuff for the research of it. The books
Speaker 3: were fascinating because you could check the Paramount people could
Speaker 3: check them out, and so you'd open it up and
Speaker 3: it was checked out by Cecil B. De mill Or.
Speaker 3: I remember one Native Americans and it was Marlon Brando.
Speaker 3: I checked it out. You know, I don't think it
Speaker 3: was their signatures on it, but it was their name
Speaker 3: on it, you know, so check it out would put
Speaker 3: that in there. So you'd see these famous names within
Speaker 3: the books. But they also had some of the film
Speaker 3: the picture archives in there too, and so there would
Speaker 3: be these big binders full of the proof sheets from
Speaker 3: the different productions, and it was fun looking through those
Speaker 3: to see what what pictures got killed. You know, they'd
Speaker 3: have excess through them that were never meant for a publication,
Speaker 3: and again there's nothing you know, it just it was
Speaker 3: a lossy photo. Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, but I remember
Speaker 3: that's the first time I saw pictures of like Mark
Speaker 3: Hamill's kid on set, you know, yeah, from Return of
Speaker 3: the Jedi. You know he's standing there in sitting in
Speaker 3: the Emperor's thrown room and stuff. Yes, yes, so, but yeah,
Speaker 3: there there was some of that stuff there. But again
Speaker 3: the film archives were there too, which was really interesting
Speaker 3: thing because I knew the film markovist and we would
Speaker 3: try to pull up on a flatbed because there was
Speaker 3: all film still, you know. We we found the original
Speaker 3: blooper reel for Star Wars, but without the sound and
Speaker 3: other you know, other things like that were you know,
Speaker 3: and Ben Burt would come by all the time, look
Speaker 3: because he had his archives of some sound effects that
Speaker 3: were still there, you know, his original recording as a
Speaker 3: matter of fact, the original tape, you know, the real
Speaker 3: to reel tape decks and stuff.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I just before my life is over, I
Speaker 2: just like to be locked in a room and watch
Speaker 2: all of the the film Marker, because I understand. I
Speaker 2: think it was when the documentary for the last of
Speaker 2: the sequels is being made Rise a Skywalker, or maybe
Speaker 2: it was the one before that. The woman I can't
Speaker 2: remember her name who directed that documentary, so she went
Speaker 2: through three hundred hours of behind the scenes footage from
Speaker 2: the original trilogy that had been digitized. I was just like, wow,
Speaker 2: let me add it, you know. Yeah, I love to
Speaker 2: see that stuff because it's just like an alternate universe
Speaker 2: us in there right is like and in dozens of
Speaker 2: other films that could have been made without takes.
Speaker 3: And whether it's there's a whole original cut of Star
Speaker 3: Wars before that that editor got cut John Jimpson.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a British editor, wasn't he. I remember seeing some
Speaker 2: bits of that on that old CD ROM from many.
Speaker 3: Years ago right right there that I think still exists
Speaker 3: because David Wes Reynolds I believe watched it.
Speaker 2: I believe he did. There was an article, wasn't there,
Speaker 2: and inside or somewhere like that. Yeah, yeah, because I
Speaker 2: think George said that it was something like it was
Speaker 2: just too formulaic. It was like wide shot medium, close up,
Speaker 2: close up, back to the wye, and he just didn't
Speaker 2: have that kind of kineticism or he might describe it
Speaker 2: that George was looking for. But you've become by this point,
Speaker 2: you become like an expert, right, So were people coming
Speaker 2: to you to say like, what's this? You know? Or
Speaker 2: if something was found, like is this the real thing?
Speaker 3: Or yeah? There was quite a bit of that that
Speaker 3: there was. I became kind of really well connected with
Speaker 3: the the toy people, the you know, the market those
Speaker 3: kind of for for new products and stuff, because they
Speaker 3: would have me vet them, you know, it's like does
Speaker 3: this look right? You know?
Speaker 4: And uh.
Speaker 3: And then also uh, there's the infamous story the death
Speaker 3: Star being found in a in a and I was
Speaker 3: in I was.
Speaker 2: A three store or something.
Speaker 3: I was peripherally involved with that story. And and the
Speaker 3: the full story, you know, the story that's out there
Speaker 3: because I've read the Gus Lopez who has it now
Speaker 3: and the people he bought it from. I read their
Speaker 3: version of it, and and it leaves out the details
Speaker 3: of what was happening at the ranch at the time.
Speaker 3: Was the story goes, is that the there was when
Speaker 3: I lem was in Van Eys and some in California.
Speaker 3: Before they moved to northern California, they had a storage
Speaker 3: unit down there. And this is the story that was
Speaker 3: told because I got the letter from the people that
Speaker 3: found this. The thing and the couple that owned that
Speaker 3: storage unit were retiring or moving to the Midwest. They
Speaker 3: were moving out of the southern California and they were
Speaker 3: trying to get rid of stuff, and there was a
Speaker 3: storage unit that was left. I've also heard conflicting stories
Speaker 3: about this aspect of it, but anyway, so in this
Speaker 3: they had, you know, this stuff, and according to these people,
Speaker 3: they had like these little airplane models that they let
Speaker 3: their grandkids play with, which has been always been alluded
Speaker 3: to be X wing models.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: And they had this big ball that was the death Star.
Speaker 3: They didn't really quite know what it was. So they
Speaker 3: moved to somewhere again Midwest of the United States or
Speaker 3: something like that, and they took the stuff with them
Speaker 3: and opened a thrift store, and I guess they had
Speaker 3: some of this stuff there and the death Star was there,
Speaker 3: and the the guys that found it and you recognized
Speaker 3: it immediately, and they they saw it and they went
Speaker 3: I can't remember the details of how what they their
Speaker 3: negotiation was. But the aspect was that they sent pictures
Speaker 3: to Judy Niles, who was the head of fan events
Speaker 3: at the time, and and she was she was sent
Speaker 3: She didn't know. She she was not a you know,
Speaker 3: big Star Wars fan and everything, so she would send
Speaker 3: them to me and said, do you know what's going on?
Speaker 3: I said, that's a death star. I said, that's that's
Speaker 3: the that's the model, you know, I said, that is it.
Speaker 3: They're what they're what their version of the story is
Speaker 3: that Lucasfilm said it wasn't. But what what was happening
Speaker 3: was I was saying it was. I said, that is
Speaker 3: the real thing. And I remember seeing the pictures and everything,
Speaker 3: and and and the and this letter that this person
Speaker 3: wrote and and she said, well, we asked George, and
Speaker 3: George says, we blew it up. And it said no, no,
Speaker 3: they didn't blow it up. They blew you know, they
Speaker 3: made an explosion and super imposed it. Yeah, he says,
Speaker 3: and he's we've got the death starre on the He says, no,
Speaker 3: that's a death Star from Return of the Jedi. It's
Speaker 3: not the same one. It's a it's the actual one.
Speaker 3: And so anyway, that what they were saying was what
Speaker 3: George they were repeating with George was saying officially to people.
Speaker 3: I was like, no, we don't that real death Star
Speaker 3: was just a model. Was a Matt paying There's a
Speaker 3: picture Dennis Muir and lighting it.
Speaker 2: I said, it's it's one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's it's I think I pulled up that picture.
Speaker 3: He says, here, look, you know well they George says, well,
Speaker 3: I'm not buying it from him, because I think he
Speaker 3: was asked. They were asking, you know, we could sell
Speaker 3: it to you for thirty five thousand dollars or something
Speaker 3: like that, right, And George is like, I'm not buying
Speaker 3: any of my stuff back cases you give it fair
Speaker 3: enough or or you know, forget it, you know, and
Speaker 3: fullily enough I was.
Speaker 2: I was sat next to Gus Lopez just a few
Speaker 2: weeks ago. I went to a prop store auction here
Speaker 2: at BAFTA in London to see how the other half live.
Speaker 2: And I'd interviewed Gus for the podcast and I'd sort
Speaker 2: of introduced myself. He's a hey, Jamien. While we're chatting,
Speaker 2: he's just casually bidding, you know, tens of thousands of
Speaker 2: dollars of chatting is just a different world. But he's
Speaker 2: got some crazy stuff, that guy. He really does.
Speaker 3: Yeah, i've met Gus. I've never seen his collection, but I.
Speaker 2: No, no, I'd like to someday.
Speaker 3: But I have to say before before we go, I
Speaker 3: just I read that article recently that you did, you
Speaker 3: and Clayton and marked it on Oh yeah, Skywalker Sound,
Speaker 3: and I have to say, so, having all the knowledge
Speaker 3: that I have of lucasfilm and its connections and it's growth,
Speaker 3: you know, because I was you know, that was one
Speaker 3: of the most accurate articles I've ever read, Yes, sky
Speaker 3: Sound and the history of the ranch and all that
Speaker 3: sort of stuff. So good job on well very because
Speaker 3: a lot of them are like pr pieces and this
Speaker 3: one was nice.
Speaker 2: And yeah, yeah, well all three of us have been there.
Speaker 2: I've been there once, Mark's been there once, Think Claim's
Speaker 2: been there a bunch of times. But it was just
Speaker 2: we were invited to write about it, and I'd already
Speaker 2: kind of written an article about it when I came back,
Speaker 2: and that's what led to the guys at ILM and
Speaker 2: scold San saying would you write for us, you know,
Speaker 2: after writing this kind of report. So yeah, it was
Speaker 2: just a very cool experience. And I wasn't going to
Speaker 2: sort of pretend it isn't a stunning place. I mean
Speaker 2: it's just a beautiful place. I mean, you were there
Speaker 2: many many years. Did you find working there in comparison
Speaker 2: to anywhere else you'd worked? You know, did you find
Speaker 2: it difficult leaving there for instance? Because it must have
Speaker 2: been it's such a beautiful places it sets. It just
Speaker 2: makes you feel like you're among nature, but you're among
Speaker 2: you're with creative people. It feels like the sort of
Speaker 2: the dream for so much any people. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean aside from what it meant, you know,
Speaker 3: from being part of that world, you know, Star Wars
Speaker 3: and lucasfilm and George and everything, it was just a
Speaker 3: beautiful place, you know, to work. I remember one guy
Speaker 3: he that worked there, he says, it's beautiful. He's a
Speaker 3: beautiful prison. And what he meant by that, I think
Speaker 3: what he meant by that was that once you got there,
Speaker 3: it was hard to go, you know, like to go
Speaker 3: and do any like errands for on your lunch shower
Speaker 3: because everything was a half hour away, you know, so
Speaker 3: you couldn't you know, once you got there, you had
Speaker 3: kind of had to stay for the day because you know,
Speaker 3: unless you had you could schedule your day out. But
Speaker 3: but I didn't mind that kind of prison whatsoever. It was.
Speaker 3: It was gorgeous. And the hardest part about at the time,
Speaker 3: they had three places to eat, you know, the main
Speaker 3: house had had a dinner service or lunch service, the
Speaker 3: tech Bolling Skywalker Sound had had one, and the recreational
Speaker 3: center had one, and they each had different different kinds
Speaker 3: of food. The main House had more like a proper
Speaker 3: sit down with you know, very very fancy cook food
Speaker 3: and that, and they usually have two options, you know,
Speaker 3: of food. The Skywalker Sound had a little bit more
Speaker 3: of like a buffet style of types of food, and
Speaker 3: then the rec center was more like pub style, you know, burgers,
Speaker 3: sandwiches and that kind of thing. And so the hardest
Speaker 3: part of the decision every day of working was where
Speaker 3: we're going to go for lunch, you know, so you know,
Speaker 3: they would publish on through company internet, you know, what
Speaker 3: the what the menu was for the day, and it's
Speaker 3: like that's the tough ch And I was good friends
Speaker 3: with people in other departments, for instance, like Granny and
Speaker 3: Mahara who went onto MythBusters and so you know, we'd
Speaker 3: all like correspond to each other, where do you want
Speaker 3: to go for lunch today? But no, I was glorious, say,
Speaker 3: it was definitely spoiled. And then the other thing was
Speaker 3: that the people were just amazing. There's totally true value
Speaker 3: M too, total different vibe. You know. ILM was very
Speaker 3: not like again, not like today where it's all cubicles
Speaker 3: and computer screens and stuff like that, but you know,
Speaker 3: it was very industrial, dirty, dusty, you know, more hands on,
Speaker 3: more in the trenches kind of thing, whereas where you're
Speaker 3: definitely more clerical out at the ranch. One of the
Speaker 3: more only frustrating things I found at the Ranch is
Speaker 3: people weren't used to deadlines as much because they had
Speaker 3: pro tracted schedules of things, whereas ILM we were always like,
Speaker 3: we got to finish this by next Friday.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: So jumping between the two worlds was a little took
Speaker 3: a little adjusting at times, but I would never have
Speaker 3: given it up. It was both of them. Places were great,
Speaker 3: but again the people were was what my fondest memory
Speaker 3: of it. And then I have friends still to this
Speaker 3: day because of those Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've said it many times on the podcast when
Speaker 2: I've spoken to people that have worked there, and it
Speaker 2: seems to be there's a sort of personality type as
Speaker 2: much as anything. It's just the outlook that people have
Speaker 2: seemed to be common. You know. When I arrived at
Speaker 2: Skybalgo Sound, it was Max Smith, supervising sound editor, that
Speaker 2: invited me there, and then Laurn Peterson found out I
Speaker 2: was going there because I mentioned on my Facebook and
Speaker 2: he said, oh, I'll go down there as well, and
Speaker 2: he gave me the tour with Mac and then we
Speaker 2: coumps into John Goodson, you know, and it was just
Speaker 2: I was like, these people are the best, you know,
Speaker 2: They're just such gorgeous, amazing people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Lauren and John are amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there really are. It's funny. John was saying, Lauren,
Speaker 2: I could I could use some help. Actually, I keep
Speaker 2: finding things and thinking where does this go? You know,
Speaker 2: just a piece has fallen off the bottom of a
Speaker 2: star destroyer or something, because I think at that point
Speaker 2: they were shipping some bits out for the museum.
Speaker 3: Yeah. John's been up there doing restaurant for stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: We did a big we did a big exhibition in
Speaker 3: ninety three and the first person I heard to do do.
Speaker 3: Restoration was John Goodson, So.
Speaker 2: That would have been. I wonder when the exhibition was
Speaker 2: at the Barbican over here in London, because.
Speaker 3: That was later. I think that that was like yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, yeah, it was after I had left there.
Speaker 3: This one was for Japan is referred to as the
Speaker 3: hot To Exhibition, but it traveled around Tokyo. From Tokyo
Speaker 3: and traveled around in Japan and we did a restoration
Speaker 3: of about of over one hundred items and what we discovered,
Speaker 3: that's where we discovered a lot of stuff, and in
Speaker 3: particular the Rebel Blockade Runner, you know, the first ship
Speaker 3: you see Star Wars was retrofitted for Return of the Jedi,
Speaker 3: which I never realized up until that point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because there is a yeah you do see one,
Speaker 2: don't you when the fleet is a massing and yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And they just carved out windows in it and
Speaker 3: give it a little paint job. And so John restored
Speaker 3: it back to the original condition. So and he's the
Speaker 3: one that with the Star Wars poster and it had
Speaker 3: the it had the Playboy pin up. Yeah, John put
Speaker 3: the Star Wars poster in it. Never and that's mystified fans.
Speaker 3: It's like well, they couldn't have had a Star Wars
Speaker 3: poster in there at the time because the movie hadn't
Speaker 3: come out yet. It's like, well John put it in
Speaker 3: their nineteen ninety three so.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. We can't talk about Don Bees
Speaker 2: though without talking about well, why I started with the
Speaker 2: archive tour. I mean I watched that thing a thousand times.
Speaker 2: I didn't even have laser disc. I couldn't afford it
Speaker 2: at the time. I think I was just about to
Speaker 2: make the leap and it was like this new DVD
Speaker 2: thing was coming, but a friend of mine had it
Speaker 2: and I got a little v VHS knockof copy of it,
Speaker 2: and I wore that thing out watching that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was that I have to my my appearance,
Speaker 3: and that was very disappointing in that the way they
Speaker 3: edited it. And again I they they they didn't tell
Speaker 3: me much other than they recorded me, you know, doing
Speaker 3: an intro and yeah, I'm not a performer and uh
Speaker 3: and so I felt very stilted then and then they
Speaker 3: they gave me like a recorder and just told me
Speaker 3: to talk about different things and that's you know, that's
Speaker 3: what's in there. And then yeah, I love the fact
Speaker 3: that I made it into the little program. There's a
Speaker 3: program that goes with it. But they spilled my namern
Speaker 3: so did they did they miss up the iron the
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: But people mess up the irony all the time.
Speaker 3: With me, I know, it's all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that was that was a very sort of
Speaker 2: cool introduction to wow, this stuff is still there and
Speaker 2: that kind of what year was that that would have been, well, we.
Speaker 3: Moved archives over in ninety one July ninety one. That
Speaker 3: would have been like ninety three then, wouldn't it. I
Speaker 3: think probably around that time ninety two, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Because that was when like Stars Inside it was starting
Speaker 2: to appear later a bit, a little bit later, and
Speaker 2: then it was Stars Galaxy magazine and like all these
Speaker 2: special edition talk was coming back, and then of course
Speaker 2: you were heavily involved in the special editions.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean yeah, that yeah, the there there was
Speaker 3: like that dark time between Jedi and the special editions
Speaker 3: where almost and again there's just from an observation, not
Speaker 3: an actual thing. But like George didn't even want to
Speaker 3: talk about Star Wars. He's like, I want to do
Speaker 3: other stuff, which I completely understand, and so but at
Speaker 3: the same time, I think everyone recognized that was their strongest,
Speaker 3: strongest thing. So that's when the what was the Shadow Shadow,
Speaker 3: Shadows of the Empire, Shadows of the Empire came out
Speaker 3: and everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was kind of like a soundtrack and a
Speaker 2: book and a game everything, but the movie, Yeah, I
Speaker 2: saw a multi media explosion.
Speaker 3: But yeah, and then there were the games. I you know,
Speaker 3: Lucas Arts Games was starting to boom at that point,
Speaker 3: and there were a lot of games. And I got
Speaker 3: to meet a lot of the game designers and they
Speaker 3: every everybody would use an excuse to come to the Archives.
Speaker 3: You know, it's like and I was like, yeah, come
Speaker 3: on in. You know I didn't I didn't mind. I
Speaker 3: like the company, but uh yeah, and that's I got
Speaker 3: to know a lot of people from that point of view.
Speaker 3: And then the other thing was was fun at the
Speaker 3: archives was particularly when once we moved to the ranch.
Speaker 3: You know, we'd be having lunch or something and there'd
Speaker 3: be some celebrity and you know there, and we're like
Speaker 3: invite them up to the and so like Nelson Hall
Speaker 3: is a good friend that he was, you know, my
Speaker 3: cohort up there, and and uh oh gosh, uh Graham
Speaker 3: Nash was he was a big fan of Crosby, Stills
Speaker 3: and Nash and a Graham. Nash came h for lunch
Speaker 3: with somebody and and Nelson's like talked to the He
Speaker 3: knew the person that Graham was talking to, so he
Speaker 3: invited Graham to come to the archives. And Graham's this
Speaker 3: is lovely. He says, you know, my son would would
Speaker 3: really enjoy that. I'm going to be back here in
Speaker 3: a few weeks, where you think you could give him
Speaker 3: a tour when he comes back. So Nelson gave his
Speaker 3: son a tour and and and became kind of became
Speaker 3: uh pen pal buddies with non uh and uh and
Speaker 3: stayed in touch for years. So yeah, so we always
Speaker 3: talked about grant Imahara would shoke. He says, oh, you're
Speaker 3: using your powers for evil again. You know, every time
Speaker 3: we would invite somebody famous into the Archives, I.
Speaker 2: Did get a few looks when I was sitting there
Speaker 2: in the having lunch with Lorn and Mac like, people
Speaker 2: like he's doing over there with Lawn Like you know, oh,
Speaker 2: he's not famous. You know, I sometimes would get mistaken
Speaker 2: for Moby a few years back. So yeah, so I
Speaker 2: wondered if that crossed I did have. I did look
Speaker 2: up to see a few people staring at me, but
Speaker 2: I was beef burger.
Speaker 3: I was at ILM one time that during the prequel time,
Speaker 3: and because I had spent so much time on first
Speaker 3: unit with on the shooting that George knew me, you know,
Speaker 3: and knew me by name and everything and uh. And
Speaker 3: there were again kind of an unwritten rule, they don't
Speaker 3: don't interact with George, you know. They were particularly the younger,
Speaker 3: you know, c G people that could. They didn't want
Speaker 3: anyone to get starts for So George was in line
Speaker 3: to get a coffee at Java the Hut. This is
Speaker 3: we We had Java the Hut, which was a little
Speaker 3: shack that was at the old ILM studios, and and
Speaker 3: I was standing in line with Nelson and we were
Speaker 3: waiting to get a coffee and George came out of
Speaker 3: the line and he saw me, and he goes and
Speaker 3: he said, ho, hi, and you know how you doing
Speaker 3: and everything, and we chatted for a few seconds and
Speaker 3: then he off he went. And it was very funny
Speaker 3: because then there was all of a sudden this all
Speaker 3: the people around me, who none of them who I knew,
Speaker 3: but they're all employees kind of like, then, who's he
Speaker 3: that that George knew? You know, it must be somebody.
Speaker 2: So when you when you sort of realized that the
Speaker 2: special Editions are coming, that was an exciting time for you,
Speaker 2: like in terms of your employment, but also in terms
Speaker 2: of your fandom as well, if you like, because it's like, wow,
Speaker 2: I get to see these films again on the big
Speaker 2: screen and get to be involved. I mean, how cool
Speaker 2: to be Boba fair. I mean, it just kind of
Speaker 2: it's kind.
Speaker 3: Of crazy that one happened. That one happened kind of
Speaker 3: not by accent, but that was like a last minute
Speaker 3: edition the other ones because I'm I'm in all three
Speaker 3: of the special editions, either as a Stormtrooper, Imperial officer
Speaker 3: or something like that.
Speaker 5: You're in the band, in the Band and Jedi the
Speaker 5: Jedi Rocks sequence. Yeah, but a lot of that came
Speaker 5: about was like you know, again it was Nelson and I.
Speaker 5: I did a lot of that, and they would need
Speaker 5: extra stormtroopers. And because I had done stormtroopers, I did
Speaker 5: a stormtrooper the Panasonic commercials with George Nelson and I
Speaker 5: both were in that for and so we were all
Speaker 5: the right size, you know, so we need a stripcher.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'll do it.
Speaker 2: I guess trying to find well, this is going to
Speaker 2: be a New Hope, I better find a New Hope
Speaker 2: stormtob board. Was it like everyone was investigating.
Speaker 3: Yeah. To be honest with you, I even as the
Speaker 3: archivists at that point, I didn't realize a deep dive
Speaker 3: that some of the fans ultimately would go into. To me,
Speaker 3: they were all stormtroopers. They all looked roughly the same
Speaker 3: there there. I don't think there was actually I think
Speaker 3: there was one helmet there, you know, eventually I found out,
Speaker 3: but I don't think there was. There was only one
Speaker 3: helmet from New hep period. The most of them were
Speaker 3: from uh, Empire, Jedi or combination of both. But I
Speaker 3: know when they were doing the sequence with the do
Speaker 3: Bachs in in the desert and and they had it,
Speaker 3: they brought in a couple extra you know, storm trivers
Speaker 3: for that. We sent costumes off, but the backpacks and
Speaker 3: everything had to be remade, had to be faked because
Speaker 3: none of that existed. So very very little of the
Speaker 3: New Hope actually was in the archives. Uh. That was
Speaker 3: you know, costume.
Speaker 2: Bits and sold in a thrift store in.
Speaker 3: The Yeah, somewhere outside or outside of L Street somewhere,
Speaker 3: you know they yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe, but with the buffet costume in good condition?
Speaker 2: Was that together or did we well that one.
Speaker 3: It's funny because I did an interview with the Boba
Speaker 3: Fet Fan Club, a group of fans, and I have
Speaker 3: been told that, you know, my cop my costume that
Speaker 3: was cobbled together for that was a combination of a
Speaker 3: bunch of different eras of Boba Fet. And the story
Speaker 3: behind that on was we we were we were shooting
Speaker 3: the the Jedi Rocks thing I helped provide you find
Speaker 3: the help. The mass that I wore with was the
Speaker 3: bith the big band member. Nelson was wearing the greedo
Speaker 3: looking character, which was sculpted because Gredo long Long had
Speaker 3: disappeared and it never made it through the archives, but
Speaker 3: it would have been unusable because of the rubber. And
Speaker 3: then and then some of the other characters were newly made,
Speaker 3: you know, all the dancers were newly made costumes. And
Speaker 3: we were shooting that sequence that day and George is
Speaker 3: directing and Eric McCallum producing, and it was shot at
Speaker 3: I l M on the main stage where we shot
Speaker 3: pretty much everything and uh, George and Rick were talking
Speaker 3: over by the video monitors and laughing and and and
Speaker 3: then Rick came up and to me. We were in
Speaker 3: a break and Rick came up to me. He says,
Speaker 3: it's done it because he knew I was the Archives.
Speaker 3: I had left the Archives at that point, but but
Speaker 3: it was only a few months prior. And he says,
Speaker 3: is there a do we you? Is there a fat
Speaker 3: costume at at at the Archives? And I said, well
Speaker 3: yes and no. So the the big Smithsonian exhibition was
Speaker 3: going on, which I think became the Barbican Exhibition evctually,
Speaker 3: and Uh, I said, we had just sent the one
Speaker 3: pristine bulba fet costume to to the UH to this
Speaker 3: to be photographed for its Smithsonian and it was so
Speaker 3: we didn't have one complete one. I says, I probably
Speaker 3: could pull together one. I said, but no, there's not
Speaker 3: you know, one together. And he says, would it be
Speaker 3: would you be able to do I said, yeah, I
Speaker 3: could do it. He said, okay, Uh, lunchtime, can you
Speaker 3: run up there and get We'll send you up with
Speaker 3: a pa. You run up and get the bubba fet costume?
Speaker 3: I said sure, And he says, who can wear it?
Speaker 3: I s and I had done it once before, and
Speaker 3: I said, I you know, if it's me. He goes, okay,
Speaker 3: well you play it. Then he says, George has this
Speaker 3: great idea. He wants Boba trying to hit on the dancers.
Speaker 3: I said, oh okay, And so lunchtime rolled around along.
Speaker 3: They gave me a pack lunch and I ate it
Speaker 3: on the way up to the ranch while the PA
Speaker 3: drove me up there. And I had like ten to
Speaker 3: fifteen minutes to pull together costume from memory. And the
Speaker 3: hardest part was finding pieces that were in good condition.
Speaker 3: You know, while the costume is beat up by design,
Speaker 3: there's a difference between beat up and broken, you know.
Speaker 3: And the helmets were pretty good condition, that body armor
Speaker 3: was pretty good condition. The backpack I had a hard
Speaker 3: time finding, and the only one that I was found,
Speaker 3: and I was thinking, well, as long as I don't
Speaker 3: turn around in it, all we need is a silhouette
Speaker 3: of it, you know, so the rocket pack and the
Speaker 3: little nozzle, rocket nozzles on the side and everything, And
Speaker 3: so I was looking for pieces that weren't broken, because
Speaker 3: a lot of the rocket nozzle, either rocket pack or
Speaker 3: the nozzles were chipped or cracked or whatever. So I
Speaker 3: found one that was kind of good, but it had
Speaker 3: a actually designed in the back a slash which is
Speaker 3: supposed to be the battle damage from the Battle over
Speaker 3: the Sarlac bit. Yeah, so I figured, well, as long
Speaker 3: as I don't turn around, that one would be fine.
Speaker 3: So I pulled all this together in a matter ten
Speaker 3: to fifteen minutes and got back to the to shoot.
Speaker 3: We finished shooting what we were shooting, and then at
Speaker 3: the end of the day jumped into the costume and
Speaker 3: shot this sequence. And that's how that's how it came about.
Speaker 3: I you know, I think we only did two or
Speaker 3: three takes and was over in ten or fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2: And was that you also in it for the a
Speaker 2: New Hope bit with the new Jabba.
Speaker 3: No, that that was Mark Austin. Yeah, yeah, he's he's
Speaker 3: so Mark was. It was a funny story because, uh,
Speaker 3: when I worked back on The Fly, a movie called
Speaker 3: The Fly. Uh, the the Guy Hudson was a guy
Speaker 3: I worked with. And guy started out in the UK
Speaker 3: in London, uh in with Brian Johnson effects on Alien
Speaker 3: and a whole bunch of other films. And he was
Speaker 3: actually according to Guy, he was the one they tested
Speaker 3: tested the chest burster on uh when when they you know,
Speaker 3: for for Alien Anyway, Guy did a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: stuff in the UK and then and then he worked
Speaker 3: on Enemy Mine and made this connection with Chris Wayless's
Speaker 3: company because Enemy Chris worked with Enemy Mine on Enemy
Speaker 3: Mine and he Guy eventually made it to the US
Speaker 3: and I worked with him on the fly. So Guy
Speaker 3: became a friend. And and through this weird connection, Mark Austin,
Speaker 3: who's from the UK, was working at an ad agency
Speaker 3: and somehow Guy knew the his boss or something. So
Speaker 3: Guy was over in London at one point he had
Speaker 3: already been working here, had been working on movies and everything.
Speaker 3: So Guy and Mark met, you know, at at a function,
Speaker 3: a company function or something, and they stayed in touch.
Speaker 3: And then eventually Mark made it to il M and
Speaker 3: Guy was at at that point working at ILM as
Speaker 3: a match mover, and and they they they were buddies,
Speaker 3: you know, they they were friends. And and I think
Speaker 3: it's the first day Mark tells, the first day that
Speaker 3: he worked at ILM, he saw a guy. Didn't know
Speaker 3: he was working there anyway, So I get this call
Speaker 3: from Guy one day he says, I've got he used
Speaker 3: to call the fans squids. He said, I've got I've
Speaker 3: got this the biggest Star Wars squid. I know. He
Speaker 3: says he wants to he wents to come to the archives.
Speaker 3: Do you think you could show him? I said, yeah, sure,
Speaker 3: bring him up. So Guy and Mark came up, and
Speaker 3: that's how I first met Mark. And then I found
Speaker 3: out Mark was this huge Bubba Fett fan. And it
Speaker 3: was like a religious experience for Mark to hold the
Speaker 3: Boba Fet helmet and he got to put it on
Speaker 3: and everything. And years later we were doing this thing
Speaker 3: for marketing. They in the ramp up. It was, it
Speaker 3: was special editions were already happening, and it was a
Speaker 3: ramp up to the prequels. And they had this Mark
Speaker 3: huge marketing summit, a licensing summit they called it, at
Speaker 3: the Ranch, and as part of that, they had entertainment
Speaker 3: throughout the day. So we opened up the proceedings at
Speaker 3: the Stag Theater and Skywalker Ranch with all the attendees
Speaker 3: there and and Darth Vader strode in with you know,
Speaker 3: twelve storm Troopers or whatever, and and gave a speech
Speaker 3: which was pre recorded by James Earld Jones. That was
Speaker 3: customed for the thing, and we had our local actor
Speaker 3: play Vader. And then at the end of the presentations
Speaker 3: that day, George came out, but he was preceded by
Speaker 3: c THREEPO and RTD two who introduced again with custom
Speaker 3: dialogue from Anthony Daniels. But it was a grant E
Speaker 3: Mohara that played three and introduced George, and then George
Speaker 3: talked about he had just started writing the prequels the
Speaker 3: night before, and then everyone was to retire to the
Speaker 3: scoring stage, which was set up like the cantena from
Speaker 3: Star Wars. And so what we needed, what they wanted
Speaker 3: is the Canteena to be populated with creatures and denizens
Speaker 3: of moncisely. So what we did was recruited all these
Speaker 3: ILM people. We had about thirty or thirty five people.
Speaker 3: I put out like a casting call, and some people
Speaker 3: got to wear costumes with masks, and some people were
Speaker 3: just you know, with their face with makeup or whatever on.
Speaker 3: And we just populated it with this, and of course
Speaker 3: I called Mark up. I said, we got we want
Speaker 3: to have Boba Fett. You want to play it? Yes,
Speaker 3: you know, and so Mark got got to be Boba Fett.
Speaker 3: So when the special editions came along for it to
Speaker 3: do that sequence, which is only a couple months later,
Speaker 3: I believe, or right around the same time when it
Speaker 3: came up that we needed a Boba fette, Mark was
Speaker 3: selected for that.
Speaker 2: So that's how he That's very cool.
Speaker 3: He probably would have done what I did had had
Speaker 3: they had more time, but because it was the same day.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I wonder if you'd be able to answay.
Speaker 2: I've been trying to dig into this for many, many years.
Speaker 2: You know that bit in from Stars to Jedi the
Speaker 2: making of a saga where they talk about George actually
Speaker 2: wanted to Matt in a jab of the Hut, and
Speaker 2: there's like these designs, these penciled or pen drawings of
Speaker 2: the original actor Declan mulholland, wasn't it, and then a
Speaker 2: character sort of over the top never been I would
Speaker 2: to figure out who those drawings are by. They're not
Speaker 2: by Nilo, they're not by Joe.
Speaker 3: It looks like Joe, it looks like Joe's style.
Speaker 2: It does look like Joe's style. But yeah, I just
Speaker 2: wondered if you ever came across anything to do with
Speaker 2: that scene, because it's something, you know, I found out
Speaker 2: back then, and I've always wondered about, Yeah, it really
Speaker 2: was George's intention, because otherwise why would there be a costume,
Speaker 2: And maybe I wondered if it was maybe like a
Speaker 2: re release idea at some point in the eighties, you know,
Speaker 2: when the films came out again.
Speaker 3: My feeling always was, I, I have no proof whatsoever,
Speaker 3: and I've always been mystified by well, I assumed that
Speaker 3: was a Joe drawing. It could have been a Ralph.
Speaker 3: Maybe it was Ralph trying. Yeah, maybe, but if if
Speaker 3: if it was truly at that time, it would have
Speaker 3: been Joe or Ralph, it wouldn't have been anybody else,
Speaker 3: but because Neilo didn't come along till lampor right, So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: but I always felt that was retcond you know, you
Speaker 3: know that it was something that they did after around
Speaker 3: the Jedi time, and George said, oh, this is what
Speaker 3: it would have looked like, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wondered if it was to do with like
Speaker 2: the trilogy re release or something when Jedi came out
Speaker 2: with it, Oh, should we just do this now? And
Speaker 2: that's because I always had in mind maybe, but yeah, no, interesting.
Speaker 2: And then of course you were there for the prequels
Speaker 2: as well, like building U R two units, puppeteering droids.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's one thing to join the company that
Speaker 2: made the film that inspired you to get into the industry.
Speaker 2: It's another to then do the sequels or the prequels
Speaker 2: to those movies. I mean that must have been the
Speaker 2: rule blast few.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that was I mean, I kind of It's
Speaker 3: funny because every couple of years when I was at
Speaker 3: ILM start, you know, starting in the late eighties early nineties,
Speaker 3: there's always this rumor, Oh, George is going to start
Speaker 3: up the prequels, Oh Georgia, you know, and it was
Speaker 3: not always unfounded, you know, I don't know if somebody
Speaker 3: was just being hopeful. And so then when it finally
Speaker 3: started and I heard him, you know, I mean we
Speaker 3: knew it anyway, but then I was at that licensing
Speaker 3: summit where he actually says, yeah, I just started working
Speaker 3: on the prequels last night. It was all of a sudden.
Speaker 3: The whole place was energized, you know, and you know,
Speaker 3: they ramped up with the art department, which Doug Chang
Speaker 3: heading that up on the third floor of the main house,
Speaker 3: and you know, friends started working. John Goodson started working
Speaker 3: for them. I would be giving them tours of people.
Speaker 3: Gavin Bouquet came out when he was selected as production designer,
Speaker 3: and I was showing him stuff that we had, you know,
Speaker 3: and we struck up, you know, a good friendship and everything,
Speaker 3: and so I was always looking for was only looking
Speaker 3: for a while. How am I going to get into this?
Speaker 3: How am I going to get involved in this? And
Speaker 3: so I was working at ILM and I got you know,
Speaker 3: I got to be involved in some of the early stuff.
Speaker 3: The models hadn't started yet because they had they were
Speaker 3: slowly ramping up, but they were doing stuff like they
Speaker 3: needed a battle droid built full size and the Droidika
Speaker 3: the three leged and built a full size for reference
Speaker 3: in London. And of course the early days of how
Speaker 3: we're going to do this kind of thing, people figuring
Speaker 3: it out, so they needed these kinds of things which
Speaker 3: they would have probably in this day and age. I
Speaker 3: wasn't involved with that, but then they did the C
Speaker 3: three po puppet and so I got involved with that.
Speaker 3: I was asked to be on that crew. So I
Speaker 3: got to model the head and a couple other bits
Speaker 3: and pieces of it. And Michael Lynch, who was running
Speaker 3: the the that project, was going to be the puppeteer
Speaker 3: for it, and then we got this call one day.
Speaker 3: We were also at the time ILM was very busy
Speaker 3: with the commercial division, so we were bouncing back and
Speaker 3: forth between film working commercial work and everything like that.
Speaker 3: And I might have been working on a commercial when this,
Speaker 3: but we got this call one day there was already
Speaker 3: started shooting in London and and because I was the
Speaker 3: you know, one of the key personal appearance operators, and
Speaker 3: then I trained Nelson Hall and Grant Yamahara to also
Speaker 3: do some of that. But then we would use Grant
Speaker 3: for C three pos, so either Nelson or I would
Speaker 3: operate R two when Grant was C three PO. We
Speaker 3: got this call one day from production saying Rick McCallum
Speaker 3: wants to talk to you three of you about our
Speaker 3: two issues that they're having on location in London. And
Speaker 3: so we got on this conference call and it was myself, Grant, Nelson,
Speaker 3: I think there was the head of the model apartment
Speaker 3: at at il M, and H and then Rick on
Speaker 3: the other and Peter Hutchinson, who was effects supervisor. And
Speaker 3: I felt so bad for poor Peter because he really
Speaker 3: got the raw deal on on the whole thing. But
Speaker 3: they're basically saying that, oh, AR two is not working
Speaker 3: and and this and that, and it's like, well, I
Speaker 3: think George basically forgot how to shoot ART two.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: I didn't say that at the time, but you know
Speaker 3: that It's just like R two is very limited in
Speaker 3: what it can do. You know, there's surfaces that it
Speaker 3: can't run over, you know. And George I had worked
Speaker 3: with George ready enough to know how he works, and
Speaker 3: and he tend to direct AR two like an actor,
Speaker 3: you know, and walk up the steers over there, you know.
Speaker 3: And there's just some things AR two can't do, you know.
Speaker 3: And and so the the effects crew were very capable, amazing,
Speaker 3: amazingly talented group of people, but they were overwhelmed with
Speaker 3: all the other stuff that they had to do, and
Speaker 3: they really didn't have the time to do what they
Speaker 3: needed to do with this character. So George is I guess,
Speaker 3: progressively getting frustrated at you know, the functions and stuff
Speaker 3: like that. So at the by the end of that call,
Speaker 3: Rick decided, Okay, here's here's what we'll do. Well, you
Speaker 3: guys at ILM, you you build an R two and
Speaker 3: then we'll have these guys do some modifications to an
Speaker 3: R two here, and then you know, we'll we'll get
Speaker 3: a fine functioning R two out of the whole deal.
Speaker 3: So I sat down with a team of people and
Speaker 3: we came up with a way of coming up with
Speaker 3: any of the possible things that they could throw at
Speaker 3: R two that you know, because the problems we were
Speaker 3: hearing is running over certain surfaces, not enough power to
Speaker 3: push through. So so we we came up with solutions
Speaker 3: for all these and we built an R two essentially
Speaker 3: in about three weeks. And then I went over to
Speaker 3: London and shot, and so they had they shot at
Speaker 3: Leifsten for a few weeks, went to Tunisia, shot for
Speaker 3: a few weeks there, and then they were come they
Speaker 3: came back to London and so I got there the
Speaker 3: towards the end of July ninety seven and I think
Speaker 3: it was, and and stayed until September and shooting. But
Speaker 3: by that point the hard R two stuff was kind
Speaker 3: of done, you know, and so the AR two that
Speaker 3: I brought over got regulated as a background R two unit.
Speaker 3: It wasn't the blue and mine was yellow, and so
Speaker 3: I shot a lot of stuff with second unit. I
Speaker 3: did a couple of shots with first unit, the R
Speaker 3: two leaving the Naboo Starfighter with with Liam Neeson and
Speaker 3: Ewan to go on to the desert and the introduction
Speaker 3: of the first time Anakin Obi Wan meet I was.
Speaker 3: I helped with that. Kenny Baker was archer in that shot.
Speaker 3: But so it was pretty easy. It was a pretty
Speaker 3: pretty easy gig for me. And again I felt I
Speaker 3: felt really bad because I was kind of put in
Speaker 3: this position, Oh, this sky is gonna come over and
Speaker 3: show you it's done to the crew, and and I
Speaker 3: was I didn't want to be in that position. So
Speaker 3: I was trying to be as nice as possible to
Speaker 3: the to the effects crew, and and I would say
Speaker 3: everybody but one person, uh welcomed me with open arms.
Speaker 3: And and and I again, I'm still friends with a
Speaker 3: couple of people that I met that day. Uh there
Speaker 3: and we got we had a lot of fun shooting
Speaker 3: the background r twos. You know, there's a team of
Speaker 3: us that did all these background r twos and and
Speaker 3: we had a great time. And then when they announced
Speaker 3: when that they're going to be moving production to Sydney
Speaker 3: for episode two and three, I thought, well, this is
Speaker 3: my opportunity, you know. So I wrote a letter to
Speaker 3: to Rick McCallum and I said, just f yi, I said,
Speaker 3: you know, if you think the R twos are ready
Speaker 3: to go, they're not because again just the needs of production,
Speaker 3: things are pulled apart and you know, they're just kind
Speaker 3: of thrown into a crate shipped over and they need
Speaker 3: to be gone through. And I said, you know we
Speaker 3: need R two is not not ready to just go
Speaker 3: before cameras, and I'd be happy to be involved in
Speaker 3: some way. And so he welcomed that, and he's put
Speaker 3: together a budget. He says, go and check out, you
Speaker 3: know what condition everything's in. Give me a budget and
Speaker 3: we'll go from there. And I did that, gave him
Speaker 3: a budget, He accepted it, and we worked more than
Speaker 3: if you Yeah, well I was I was a paid
Speaker 3: I wasn't getting the money directly. I was paid as
Speaker 3: an employee. You know, I knew that he had a limit,
Speaker 3: you know, I couldn't. You know. Rick was a very
Speaker 3: very fiscally minded producer. Yes, as one should be, I suppose,
Speaker 3: And so yeah, so I pulled together team and Nelson Hall,
Speaker 3: Granny Mahara, a couple other people and we for three months,
Speaker 3: I think it was. We we pulled apart all the
Speaker 3: r twos, Grant cleaned up all the electronics. We we
Speaker 3: we cleaned up everything. We restored the original blue color
Speaker 3: that that had been overpainted on episode one, and and
Speaker 3: got this, got a whole collection of AR twos for that.
Speaker 3: And then when I went over to Sydney for episode
Speaker 3: two and three to do that, and then also I
Speaker 3: was meant to operate see three Pao puppet when we
Speaker 3: got there, because the original in the original script you
Speaker 3: first see see three Paol as a puppet and then
Speaker 3: he padme clads him with with the armor, which is
Speaker 3: and again a cut scene that's never been really revealed.
Speaker 3: And uh, when I we got there, Tony Anthony Daniels
Speaker 3: uh said he wanted to give it a try as
Speaker 3: as the puppeteer. And I was more than happy to
Speaker 3: relinquish the duty because the idea of being in the
Speaker 3: desert wearing that thing is was not something I was
Speaker 3: looking forward to. So so Tony did it and and
Speaker 3: he was great.
Speaker 2: So yeah, amazing, like you said earlier, amazing he was
Speaker 2: still in shape to be able to fit in that thing.
Speaker 3: Well, it was really interesting is because he talked about that.
Speaker 3: You know, he called while I was in Sydney, he
Speaker 3: was still in London, and we talked about, you know,
Speaker 3: what's going on and how we're you know, and he says, yeah,
Speaker 3: I started dieting, and and he got there and and
Speaker 3: he fit fine. You know, we put the costume on
Speaker 3: the first day he arrived and showed George. You know
Speaker 3: that he walked on set and even though he wasn't
Speaker 3: called that day for on set, but he came on
Speaker 3: set and we made this big thing and George commented
Speaker 3: and everything, and but he fit the costume fine. But
Speaker 3: he continued to diet and so as we as the
Speaker 3: week's rolled along, it was fitting looser and looser. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's like you can always tell. The hard part was
Speaker 3: putting the little trunks up onto him, and you know,
Speaker 3: it's a little squeeze in the beginning. At the end,
Speaker 3: it just.
Speaker 2: And then you went on, I'm sorry, we've been just interjected.
Speaker 2: We've been to for an hour and a half. Here,
Speaker 2: if you've got another ten minutes just to kind.
Speaker 3: Of oh, I'm yeah, I'm completely good. Yeah, good, as
Speaker 3: long as you're yeah, rattling on too long.
Speaker 2: No, No, it's brilliant. I mean it's great, this is
Speaker 2: my stuff I love for us. And then you know,
Speaker 2: after the prequels as well, just having that time working
Speaker 2: for ILM and you know, other museum projects and things.
Speaker 2: We Starship Troopers. He is in there, yeah, Galaxy Quurtet,
Speaker 2: Glex Request, Yeah, Galaxy Quest the other day John Duncan,
Speaker 2: Oh yeah yeah, John Duncan, Yeah, building the protector and
Speaker 2: oh yeah yeah yeah yeah. So very cool to be
Speaker 2: able to sort of do more big projects like sort
Speaker 2: of tempole movies. What was your involvement on some of those?
Speaker 3: Well, and a Galaxy Quest. I supervised them. The dry
Speaker 3: dock model, Uh, you know that the protector is in
Speaker 3: when they leave, so it's a it's a small all bit.
Speaker 3: I mean, we we worked on it for quite a
Speaker 3: bit of time, but it was it was a fun
Speaker 3: engineering project because it had to be self sustaining. It
Speaker 3: was kind of like the dry dock from the original
Speaker 3: Star Trek, you know, so we knew it had to
Speaker 3: be self sustaining and it had to be able to
Speaker 3: be hung and lit and all that sort of thing. So, uh,
Speaker 3: you know, trying to engineer that and come apart in
Speaker 3: pieces because we it had to you know, had to
Speaker 3: be able to get a camera and stuff so still
Speaker 3: maintain its structure while being able to pull half of
Speaker 3: it away. So that was that was fun. Parts of
Speaker 3: the Caribbean was another fun track. I had just come off,
Speaker 3: you know, one of the Star Wars movies. And then
Speaker 3: I was working on the Matrix sequels, which was not
Speaker 3: through ILM, but it was through a bunch of ILM
Speaker 3: model makers that they a local they they created essentially
Speaker 3: a model shop locally here in northern California to work
Speaker 3: on the Matrix sequels. And Michael Lynch again, who was
Speaker 3: the original project manager on C three po puppet and
Speaker 3: also puppeteer, he led that team and and so I
Speaker 3: was working on that for a little bit and then
Speaker 3: I got a call to come back to ILM to
Speaker 3: do Terminator, which is a female where the female terminators
Speaker 3: I can't.
Speaker 2: Remember is that three three?
Speaker 3: Yeah? But when I got back, they weren't quite ready,
Speaker 3: so they threw me out of Pirates Caribbean. And because
Speaker 3: I had three D modeling experience, I was able to
Speaker 3: I was able to help build the ships and we
Speaker 3: figured out a way to do it with laser cutting.
Speaker 3: And all sorts of stuff, and we worked with a
Speaker 3: real ship, right, which was amazing. So it was real
Speaker 3: fun to do. That project is one of the more
Speaker 3: fun ones that I got to do because we were
Speaker 3: learning a new skill and also you know, working with
Speaker 3: materials and in a style even though we were using
Speaker 3: modern technology, we're using in a style that was hundreds
Speaker 3: of years old, you know, making making these pirate ships.
Speaker 3: And so we built I think three pirate ships for
Speaker 3: the first film, and and then there was a spate
Speaker 3: of ships all of a sudden. We did a ship
Speaker 3: for Hook for Peter pan uh that it was the PJ.
Speaker 3: Hogan when with Jason Isaac's place captain. Yeah, and that
Speaker 3: was that was a drama, that one, because we ended
Speaker 3: up building the ship twice through miscommunication, not mine but
Speaker 3: someone else's. And then uh, and then we did a
Speaker 3: ferry for War of the Worlds that that turns over
Speaker 3: by the trying to get on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: that was a lot of that is a model that uh.
Speaker 3: And then and then we did The Pirates two and three,
Speaker 3: and so it's like in the course of five six years,
Speaker 3: all of a sudden it was built. I built like
Speaker 3: eight or nine ships, you know, so there's a thing
Speaker 3: while yeah, it runs in cycles, and but yeah, there
Speaker 3: was a lot lots of and lots of commercials and
Speaker 3: it was an amazing time to be an island. Like
Speaker 3: you said that that the transition also part of the
Speaker 3: the end of the golden age of model making and
Speaker 3: then into the digital You know, I was there when
Speaker 3: Jurassic Park was being done. I wasn't involved whatsoever, but
Speaker 3: you know, just that that energy of like, oh, we're
Speaker 3: doing something new and exciting, and we're all like, okay,
Speaker 3: you know, our time is numbered. We're going to be
Speaker 3: Blacksmith's here. You know, we're not gonna Uh but we
Speaker 3: got busy and busier and busier, and you know, there
Speaker 3: there's apparently a figure that and I think it was
Speaker 3: episode three we made more models on episode three than
Speaker 3: they did in the original trilogy. Wow, we had almost
Speaker 3: one hundred, over one hundred people working in the model shop, huh,
Speaker 3: which you know the original trilogy I think had twelve
Speaker 3: to fifteen or something. Yeah, yeah, at any given time, so, uh,
Speaker 3: we were we weren't doing model ships per se. We're
Speaker 3: doing a lot of environments and things like that. But
Speaker 3: and then and then getting the occasional fun little job
Speaker 3: like episode one, we got to had to refit the
Speaker 3: Anakin's uh pod racer cockpit for inserts, so we did
Speaker 3: all that. Ben Bird got to direct that. So it
Speaker 3: was fun to be to be doing all the you know,
Speaker 3: shooting second unit or insert unit stuff, you know, little
Speaker 3: bits and pieces that you know, did a lot of
Speaker 3: the switches and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My wife's
Speaker 3: hand is Anakin's hand in the pod right at one
Speaker 3: point the we did uh lots of R two pickup
Speaker 3: shots at I l M see you know things that
Speaker 3: we missed either on both episode one and two and
Speaker 3: three as well. I watched episode two recently just because
Speaker 3: nothing was else is and it's like, oh yeah, I
Speaker 3: forgot I did. I've worked on that. You know. It
Speaker 3: was just there's lots of little pieces of and stuff
Speaker 3: that we got to do. But there's an amazing time to
Speaker 3: be at Islum. Yeah, and and then you know, like
Speaker 3: I said, that transition to digital and then ultimately they
Speaker 3: moved out of the location and then we got sold
Speaker 3: to another company and and yeah that's unfortunately that's when
Speaker 3: it started all going away.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, it must have been difficult for you
Speaker 2: at that point to leave somewhere that you've been so
Speaker 2: long that you've you know, your heart was there, I
Speaker 2: guess definitely.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well what more is it like the the passage
Speaker 3: of the time of of of like you know, I
Speaker 3: will never be together again doing all this. So, you know,
Speaker 3: we occasionally have these reunions every year there's a Model
Speaker 3: Shop party, a reunion party, which is not just limited
Speaker 3: the Model Shop. It was like whoever was at Islam
Speaker 3: or on. Yeah, and so it's great to see all
Speaker 3: the people and unfortunately to see some of the you
Speaker 3: know know that some of the people have no longer
Speaker 3: with us, but yeah, there. We had the in twenties seventeen,
Speaker 3: well we didn't do it in twenty twenty because of
Speaker 3: pandemic twenty twenty one, and then twenty twenty three we
Speaker 3: had the fortieths of Star Wars, Empire and Jedi and
Speaker 3: I got to be got to be there. I got
Speaker 3: to meet Marshall Lucas, which was amazing, oh nice, and
Speaker 3: got to thank her for you know, all of her work,
Speaker 3: and she was she was, you know, really the heart
Speaker 3: of lucasfilm. I think at the time, you know, she
Speaker 3: and she got so much love and attention at these
Speaker 3: parties too, so o great.
Speaker 2: I didn't realize she'd been to those. That's really nice
Speaker 2: to hear. Yeah, you know, I once went to a
Speaker 2: thing here in London some years ago, now, maybe ten
Speaker 2: years ago. Gary Kurtz was the guest. It was just
Speaker 2: a small venue, made.
Speaker 3: Bad to meet Gary at the first one too, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Did he Yeah, maybe thirty people in the crowd and
Speaker 2: a friend of mine runs those And at the end
Speaker 2: there was you know, questions and answers kind of thing,
Speaker 2: and Gary was, you know, he's quite a formidable guy,
Speaker 2: you know, and he was talking very measured about things,
Speaker 2: and I asked about Marshia and he lit up, changed completely,
Speaker 2: and he was saying, thank you so much for your question,
Speaker 2: you know, and he sort of went into you know,
Speaker 2: how she was really the sort of emotional heart of
Speaker 2: those original films and how much you know, she's kind
Speaker 2: of been written out of the history to a certain extent.
Speaker 2: So yeah, it was nice to hear that. It must
Speaker 2: be cool, though done, looking back at all of this
Speaker 2: stuff that you achieved, all of these amazing jobs that
Speaker 2: you had over the years, do you do you take
Speaker 2: a moment to kind of go. That was pretty damn cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's funny because I, yes, I do the you know,
Speaker 3: my kids are not nearly as impressed, but but I did.
Speaker 3: I actually did two projects in the last year. One
Speaker 3: in Australia. I worked on a TV series in Australia
Speaker 3: which is a lot of fun, and it was we
Speaker 3: were making Nome puppets. It's called Gnomes. It'll be out
Speaker 3: well hopefully it'll be out worldwide, but it'll be out
Speaker 3: sometime this year. And it's uh, it's a six part
Speaker 3: series that was the way to described as hot Fuzz
Speaker 3: meets Gremlins, and.
Speaker 2: It's totally the vibe, you know.
Speaker 3: And yeah, it's a bunch of garden homes attack a
Speaker 3: small village and we got to do rod puppets and
Speaker 3: you know, all sorts of like little physical effects. I mean,
Speaker 3: I'm imagining most of it will be replaced or you know,
Speaker 3: layered with cg but but we had a blast, and
Speaker 3: I I, you know, I never out what I've done,
Speaker 3: but it's always fun when, you know, when somebody recognizes
Speaker 3: it and they say, oh yeah, what what else U really?
Speaker 3: You know, and then they start asking stories and I
Speaker 3: get to tell the stories on that one, I got
Speaker 3: to work with Justin Dix, who worked with me on
Speaker 3: episode two and three in Australia. And then I did
Speaker 3: a commercial locally that's running in the US for a
Speaker 3: company called Rubric, where my wife and I made this
Speaker 3: cloud puppet. And and you know, again, people at the
Speaker 3: last day, people were like wanting to take pictures because
Speaker 3: I was Boba Fett, you know, and I they knew that.
Speaker 3: I I don't know how they necessarily knew that, but
Speaker 3: I guess people like start looking you up on call sheets.
Speaker 3: It's like, well who am I working with? You know?
Speaker 3: So so yeah, it's it's it's it's fun to to
Speaker 3: look back. And like I said, I missed the most
Speaker 3: is the people and that environment of like we kind
Speaker 3: of can do anything, you know. There there was there's
Speaker 3: always this this feeling like if if you didn't know
Speaker 3: how to do it, there's somebody there new or had
Speaker 3: an idea and set you on a path to do that.
Speaker 3: And that was what was That was what was the
Speaker 3: most empowering and coolest part about being part of that team.
Speaker 3: And then everyone was great, and you know, like you said,
Speaker 3: there was almost like a personality of people that work there,
Speaker 3: and you could always tell the people that weren't going
Speaker 3: to make it because they didn't they were they didn't
Speaker 3: quite fit in with it. And it wasn't a matter
Speaker 3: of like aligning, you know, politically or morally or anything
Speaker 3: like that. It was just that there was you know,
Speaker 3: there was good people that that there were opinionated people,
Speaker 3: there were you know, but but you work well together
Speaker 3: and you looked out for each other, which was really great.
Speaker 2: So yeah, well, a cool place to work. I mean,
Speaker 2: the coolest thing about this podcast is I get to
Speaker 2: talk to people like you done and I really appreciate
Speaker 2: your time today and all of the stories. I'm sure
Speaker 2: you and I could talk for six hours if you
Speaker 2: had the time.
Speaker 3: Next time you make it out here, let's get together. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm actually making it out to LA this month,
Speaker 2: but not not going as north. But yeah, no, that
Speaker 2: would be good. It'd be good to good to see
Speaker 2: you in person. But I appreciate your time today and
Speaker 2: maybe come back on the podcast if you know, if
Speaker 2: there's a specific film to talk about or something in
Speaker 2: the future, because it's so you know, you've worked on
Speaker 2: so many it's just a sprinkling of what you achieved.
Speaker 2: But yeah, thank you from all of us on this
Speaker 2: side of them anyway.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you, and it's, like I said, as well
Speaker 3: as honored to be asked to be honest, I really
Speaker 3: I like your show, so it's great.
Speaker 2: Oh thank you. That was my conversation with Don Bee's.
Speaker 2: I love this one. Don's got that perfect mix of
Speaker 2: being a fan who made it in and then ended
Speaker 2: up right at the center of preserving the very thing
Speaker 2: he grew up loving. I love all those archived stories,
Speaker 2: the idea that some of this stuff was just sitting
Speaker 2: in crates or nearly thrown away and rescue last minute.
Speaker 2: It really makes you appreciate how much film history hangs
Speaker 2: by a thread. If you enjoyed this episode, do check
Speaker 2: out the rest of the film we mention this podcast.
Speaker 2: They're over one hundred and forty episodes now with the
Speaker 2: people who actually made the films and helped make the
Speaker 2: films that we grew up watching, as well as some
Speaker 2: new films as well. If you'd like to support what
Speaker 2: I do, you can head over to patreon dot com
Speaker 2: forwards last Jamie Benning, where you'll find early episodes, bonus content,
Speaker 2: and a few extras, all of which keeps the podcast going. Honestly,
Speaker 2: your support is what makes this possible. I don't make
Speaker 2: money on this on advertising. Patreon is the way.
Speaker 3: So yeah.
Speaker 2: If you can share, you can leave a review, you
Speaker 2: can join on Patreon, you can retweet or repost or
Speaker 2: whatever any of the posts that I put out there.
Speaker 2: You can follow me on Instagram, blue Sky Mastered, on Facebook,
Speaker 2: just about everywhere. Thanks for listening and I'll be back
Speaker 2: for some more jabbering on on the next episode of
Speaker 2: the Film Youmentaries podcast.
Speaker 4: Mm hm, we are getting way media.
Speaker 3: H