Skywalker

Act One: "A New Hope"

It was a misty morning, and a rainbow straddled the Oakland Bay Bridge like a croquet wicket. I was literally driving under a rainbow.

That seemed like a good omen.

This was thirty years ago, January 3, 1995. I was between jobs and at a crossroads in my career. Until then, I had made a living as a stand-up comedian, a commercial actor, a television host, and a TV comedy writer. But it had been almost two years since I had any sort of steady employment.

That, of course, is natural in show business. Employment is itinerant. I tell young people looking to get into the business that you have to have a certain temperament that goes beyond run of the mill risk tolerance. You not only have to tolerate not knowing where your next job is, but unlike say an accountant or lawyer or a computer programmer, the idea of knowing you’ll be doing the same thing at the same desk five years from now has to strike you as well… kinda boring. That’s the show business temperament: welcoming the anxious thrill that comes with dreaming of the next show, the next project, the next gig, the next adventure just over the horizon.

Or in my case, under the rainbow.

I was heading to Skywalker Ranch to outline a story with George Lucas, which I would then go home and write. Now before you get too excited, this had nothing to do with any of the Star Wars or Indiana Jones movies or the Young Indiana Jones TV show.[1] I was hired to write a script for Lucas’s educational foundation, Edutopia. It was to be a feature film about a teacher and three students – loosely based on Lucas’s own kids – that takes place thirty years into the future, in a year far, far away… 2025.

This was the mid-nineties, the dawn of the Information Age, and George Lucas was keen to make sure that public school students had access to the technology that was already changing the world. A year or two before, he had testified before Congress, calling for universal access to the internet, so that schools in rural and poor neighborhoods would not be left sticking their thumbs out to hitch a ride on the information superhighway. He believed the World Wide Web would enable students to reach well beyond the classroom to experts in whatever fields they were studying and that technological simulations[2] would make learning more experiential and therefore more fun. Aside from promoting cutting edge technology, his was a progressive, interactive view of education, moving away from the factory-style rows of desks with a teacher up front dictating the day’s lesson. These were all innovations that already existed and were working in small pockets around the country. Lucas never claimed to have invented these ideas. He created his foundation as a clearinghouse to popularize them and pull them into the mainstream.

Lucas had called Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld, because he needed someone to write a script to weave the stories of four different characters together, which Larry did every week with Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine. Larry was obviously too busy running an iconic TV series and recommended me. This was a year after I had been relieved of my duties on Seinfeld, my first TV writing job. That’s the kind of mensch Larry has always been, taking care of his friends. Even the ones he fired.

I got a call from the head of Edutopia, a former teacher and administrator named Janice. After a series of interviews over the course of about a month, I landed the job. The fact that Shelley and I had our son, Sam, enrolled in a progressive elementary school that emphasized student-centered, experiential, project-based learning probably helped, although Sam’s school was private and not as technologically inclined. Edutopia’s vision was to export those methods into the public school system.

I soon learned that this wasn’t their first attempt at a script, also titled Edutopia. They had hired another writer the year before, but Lucas didn’t think that script worked. They let me read it for reference, and I could see why. There was no conflict. It was set in this future world of utopian education, and there is no conflict in Utopia. It did a good job of depicting the educational innovations Edutopia was promoting, but it was a world of no struggle, no mistakes, and smooth sailing. Boring. The characters were not much more than mouthpieces for the educational ideas, not recognizably human.

I was directed to drive onto Skywalker Ranch, a vast expanse of bucolic rolling hills in California’s Marin County, directly to Lucas’s office, the large mansion he had personally designed and had built from redwood salvaged from an old bridge. Janice met me at the door and escorted me inside. She told me that “George” was on the second floor working in his office and wouldn’t be ready for me right away. In the meantime, she’d show me around.

“Would you like to see the THX room?”

“Sure!”

I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded exciting.[3]

A few weeks before, Shelley, the kids, and I had been visiting her family in Princeton, New Jersey, for the holidays. My father-in-law, Henry, had been an early adopter of computer technology and owned a laptop PC. This was still a rare item back in 1995. He gave it to me for my summit meeting with George Lucas so I wouldn’t come off as too much of a Luddite. By today’s standards, it was thick and heavy, but back then it was cutting edge. This was pre-WIFI, so it wasn’t like it was going to be hooked up to the internet or anything. It was just a fancy portable writin’ machine. I carried it in my briefcase as Janice led me around the corner to the THX room, stopping to point out an anteroom where the famous Bill Moyers interview with Joseph Campbell had been shot. Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which reportedly had inspired Lucas as he had outlined the original Star Wars series. The Campbell interviews with Moyers had been a surprise hit for PBS called The Power of Myth.

The THX room was relatively compact with thick carpet, double-paned, soundproofed windows and computer screens recessed into a long thin conference table, an audiophile’s dream studio.

“Do you want to hear what something sounds like in here?

“Cool!”

Janice opened a cabinet at the far end of the room, where I couldn’t help noticing a VCR on a shelf flashing 12:00 noon, a common sight back in those days for anyone visiting their parents, who had no idea how to hook up a VCR. I did not expect to see this in the THX room at Skywalker Ranch, the pinnacle of high-tech movie technological advancement.

She flipped a switch in the cabinet and started pushing buttons on one of the recessed computer keyboards, but nothing happened. No sound. Nothing but her murmured cursing, which came across quite clearly in that acoustical paradise. After about ten minutes of pressing, pounding, and grumbling, she apologized and gave up. George was ready for me anyway.

It was time to meet the Great Wizard.

Janice led me up the stairs to his office, which was a spacious living room with a coffee table surrounded by a couch and some soft chairs. George, wearing a flannel shirt and baggy jeans was standing at his desk near a large picture window flipping through papers. He gave the impression, not of a wealthy genius film director, but of a guy who might take a gander under your hood or give you an estimate on what it would cost to trim your trees. Just as I walked in, he turned over an envelope and said to no one in particular, “Hmm, a Christmas card from Kurosawa.”

Janice introduced me, and we made small talk. George made me feel instantly at ease, no airs or pretension about him. I knew he had been working on the first Star Wars prequel. I asked him how that was going. He rolled his eyes and sighed like a man shouldering an onerous burden. He told me he was still in the research phase, immersing himself in the rise of fascism in Europe in the ’30s. This was also the time in America when the Republican Party led by Newt Gingrich had finally taken control of the House of Representatives after decades in the minority. Early January marked the official beginning of his term as Speaker of the House. George thought that was “scary.” Little did we know then just how scary things would become.

After the pleasantries, he held up the previous script, sighed again and said, “Okay, now what are we gonna do with this piece-a-shit?”

Most non-writers don’t understand how much writers hate writing. That’s what Hollywood studio executives don’t get. When they play hard ball and force writers to go on strike, it doesn’t occur to them that they are giving us the best excuse not to write. It’s officially sanctioned guilt-free procrastination. That’s because writing is hard. It can be magical and transporting, but those moments of magic are tempered by long stretches of torture and tedium. With those sighs, George Lucas revealed to me that he was a real writer. We were going to toss that script and start with a blank page. Let the waterboarding begin.

He sat in a chair at one end of the coffee table. I sat on the couch. I pulled the laptop out of my briefcase as Janice placed a cassette recorder on the table to document our sessions. That’s when I noticed a stack of yellow legal pads and pencils. George picked up one of the legal pads and a pencil. I considered this for a moment, quietly placed my father-in-law’s laptop on the floor, and picked up one of the pads and a pencil. The laptop never came out again.

I wasn’t going to be working in some futuristic high-tech spaceship. This was a living room in a wooden house with pencils and paper, while downstairs the VCR flashed twelve noon.

                                                Tomorrow! Act Two!

“Zemeckis, Levinson, Lucas, Spielberg, Hanks, Williams,   Goldberg, and… Skrovan?”

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[1] While I certainly appreciated how the Star Wars franchise had penetrated the culture, I can’t honestly say I was that carried away by the magic of it all. I was twenty years old when the first one premiered, already in college and past that adolescent fanboy window. Too hip. I remember coming out of the theater thinking, “Well, that was a fun cartoon.”

[2] What we now call “virtual reality.”

[3] The room was named after Lucasfilm’s audio division, THX Ltd., which was named after George Lucas’s 1971 directorial debut, THX 1138, a cultish sci-fi movie set in a dystopian future.