I’m most of the way through Light and Magic, a Disney documentary on the history of George Lucas’ special effects company Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), which he started to do the effects for the first Star Wars film.
It’s tremendous, even if you know bits of the story already.
Highlights include:
- That George Lucas was a maker of groundbreaking artistic films: THX 1138 is a disturbing dystopian sci-fi piece; American Graffiti effectively created the last-day-of-school teen movie; Star Wars (for all its matinee charm and modern status as something of a commercial sell-out) was incredibly innovative and risky.
- That the team at ILM spent the first 6 months and almost half of the two-million dollar budget for special effects building the camera systems – literally machining parts and putting things together – that they needed to film the effects shots.
- ILM started doing effects for other movies (mostly for LucasFriends like Spielberg) to keep the lights on between Star Wars sequels.
- In 1979 George Lucas hired Ed Catmull (and most of his team from NYIT’s Computer Graphics Lab) to start Lucasfilm/ILM’s Computer Graphics division, and Catmull hired John Lasseter. PIXAR started inside Lucasfilm/ILM.
- (Adobe) Photoshop was created by ILM Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll and his brother Thomas as an attempt to do PIXAR-type work on the Macintosh.
- Several major directors spent part of their careers at ILM, including David Fincher and Joe Johnson, who Lucas put through film school.
The whole thing is a lot of fun and celebrates the hard work, inspiration and combinatorial innovation with which Lucas and ILM bought the special effects industry out of the 1950s and into the future (and doesn’t even touch Lucasfilm’s contributions to the videogame industry).
Highly recommended.