The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [40]
It was awful. The music was embarrassingly bad. The story was poorly constructed. There were many technical flaws: shadows, lint. When Alvy and Ed attended a private showing at the MGM screening room in Manhattan, the picture was so boring that Alvy fell asleep. “We were so glad that we weren’t associated with it,” he recalls.
The Tubby fiasco made them realize that they had to fly from their gilded cage. They had complete freedom and they felt they were “pushing the envelope” of technology, but somehow the situation didn’t feel right anymore. Alex Schure was never going to be Walt Disney. He had the tremendous will. He even shared their vision that computers would ultimately reduce the cost of animation. But he wasn’t a creative genius like Walt.
“We saw the movie and we said: ’This guy doesn’t have it,’” Alvy recalls.
They knew that they needed a real Hollywood player as their patron.
Then, almost as if on cue, George Lucas called.
• • •
THE WAY THAT GEORGE found them was circuitous and comical. As the 1970s ended, George saw that Hollywood was still relying on 1940s technology. Rolls of film were still cut and spliced on antiquated mechanical contraptions, and the process was tedious and cumbersome. Could computers somehow make it easier?
That was the visionary part. More urgently, George wanted to speed up the work on special effects for the Star Wars sequels. The “light saber” weapons were a real pain in the ass. The actors were filmed holding just the metallic handles of the swords. Then, in postproduction, the glowing laser beams had to be colored in by hand onto the celluloid film frames by the animators at Industrial Light and Magic. It was incredibly slow and boring. Wasn’t there some way to get computers to create the simple visual illusion?
George’s other big problem was the damned spaceships. Just getting one ship to fly across a movie frame was enough of a trick, since he had to shoot from scale models. But the scenes that showed wartime armadas of hundreds of spaceships flying all over the place—those were the killers. Every frame of film—twenty-four frames for every second of running time—had to be overlaid again and again and again. They literally had to cut and paste the pictures of each spaceship onto the tableau. The handicraft was maddeningly tedious. George wondered: Could he get a bunch of computer wizards to figure out a better way?
George himself wasn’t immersed in high technology. He didn’t know whom to call. For some reason he gave the assignment to his real estate manager, the man who advised him about what buildings to buy in his home area of Marin County, California.
In the winter of 1979, the man drove down to Stanford and wandered around the computer science department, asking whether anyone knew about computers and film. The answer was no. No one! At Stanford, no less! But a visiting professor from Carnegie Mellon recommended one of his former graduate students, a kid named Ralph Guggenheim.
Ralph was working at an obscure place, the New York Institute of Technology.
The Lucas lieutenant called. He said that he was George’s “head of development.” Ralph thought that meant the person in charge of stories and scripts. That’s what it meant in Hollywood. He didn’t realize that this guy was the head of real estate development.
The man said: We want you to run George’s new computer operation in California. Then almost instinctively he reverted to his everyday real estate huckster’s persona:
Marin County is a great place to live, he said. House values there are terrific.
Ralph was overwhelmed.
“I’m deeply honored,” he replied. “But I’m only twenty-seven. Let me introduce you to the older guys here.”
The Lucas man seemed satisfied. Then, almost as an afterthought, he asked:
“Can you make a spaceship fly