sent from: Mortimer Street, London, UK. destination: Jersey City, New Jersey, USA

   Here’s the postcard text for those people for whom reading handwriting causes discomfort and itchy toes:

People are talking about the closure of Kerner Optical, the model-making company that split off from ILM in the late 2000s after ILM/Lucasfilm moved to the Presidio. When I worked @ ILM starting in 2001 I had a view of “The Slab” where all the pyrotechnics and models would be filmed. After a company-wide page “Loud BANG on the slab, loud bang on the slab”, there would indeed be an amazing BANG and the entire trailer we were in would shake. We sat at the windows to get a glimpse of something in flames. The model shop and stage crew did all the amazing stuff that people think of when people say to me – Oh your job sounds so exciting it must be so fun!. This is where special effects started and for many of us it is truly the “special” bit of it. More than anything it is hard for me to think of a generation (of) vfx artists who will not ever come within miles of a miniature, model or pyro explosion. I don’t understand a world where that kind of experience, technical innovation and artistry can’t find a place.

   I’m re-posting below something I wrote in September of 2005 about the ILM move from San Rafael to the Presidio.

Today was the ‘last’ day of ILM at San Rafael, its home for the last 26 years. Monday morning all of ILM, save for the stage crew and the model shop, will be in the newly built facility at the Presidio in San Francisco. The people who are staying behind are doing so because building a new stage on acreage-challenged San Francisco would have been too expensive. to say nothing of city residents frowning at large pyrotechnic explosions being set off near their homes. All they need at San Rafael now is an optical department and they’d be back to the ILM of 1978, free from us pesky digital blokes.

Aside from a lot of free food, picture taking and poster looting, err, I mean, foraging, we took a group photo of the ‘last men standing’, followed by a casual and impromptu tour through the buildings hearing history from original ILMers, Dennis Muren, Lorne Peterson, and Steve Gawley, amongst others.

Dennis Muren

Lorne Peterson, what a nice chap

Steve Gawley

They told us how the entirety of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ was made in only part of one building, and when for ‘Return of The Jedi’ they finally had more buildings that they were able to afford to build bigger models as they had more space to house and film them. How there really used to be a ‘Kerner Optical Research Lab’ in the building, and how the ILM receptionist had a cover story to deflect any Star Wars fans sniffing for their location. How they used to have all the storyboards of current projects displayed in one hallway and where production meetings would take place (the origin of ‘Hallway meeting’, a term used to this day), until an overly sensitive director bristled at the idea of other directors being able to see his storyboards. How the building would shake and shrapnel would fly when they filmed explosions, knocking tools off the walls of the businesses that shared the building. How ‘Unknown Jerome’s Cookies’ baking smell would drift across the campus one day, and the old water treatment aroma would drift by the next. How the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake set the entire campus shaking as if it were on a large swell.

After ILM finished work on the first ‘Star Wars’ in Van Nuys in Southern California, five of the primary players received a phone call from George asking them if they’d be willing to re-locate to Northern California to set up the ‘new’ ILM to work on the Star Wars sequel, to an area of undeveloped landfill on the edge of the San Francisco Bay, not even that close to the city. It seems like a foregone conclusion now, but back then it wasn’t normal for people to relocate like that, especially so far from the centre of the film industry, to work on a sequel that seemed like an impossibly ambitious proposition. They were all hoping to get bonuses from working on ‘Star Wars’, and had heard a rumour that they were all going to receive a new Sony ‘Betamax’ player each (oooOOH). Every day they expected to see a big truck full of them to show up, but it never did. During ‘Star Wars’, their paycheques were signed personally by George, and they considered not cashing them as they might be worth more in time than the amount of the cheque itself, but having a horrified manager ask them not to do it, as it would mess up accounting. We heard about the employee who had been thrown out of his house by his girlfriend and quietly set a new house for himself at work, discovered only once they started having night-time security guards. People shared anecdotes revolving mostly around a few topics – accidental fires, people crashing through ceilings, or walking in on people having sex in some building or other.

The tour ended in C-theatre, the first cinema in the world to feature surround sound (and anecdotaly the first THX theatre), and how it was built to record and mix the sound for ‘Return Of The Jedi’, including a foley stage at the bottom. Dennis said it amazed him to think about how many very famous moviemakers, directors and stars had come through ILM and sat in this cinema. Someone in the front spoke up and said that from their perspective, the most famous person to ever sit in the theatre was the person who had won more Oscars than anyone else alive, referring to Dennis. We clapped and Dennis tried not to blush.

Finally we ended with a toast, to everything that ILM had been, to the model shop and stage crew staying behind, and it was done.

Although ILM the company will continue at the Presidio, and doubtless will contribute great work to movies, the ILM of San Rafael, that has seen the major moments in film-making history of the last 25 years, is over. Here are some of the highlights from 1977 to the present:

All six Star Wars films (1977-2005)
All three Indiana Jones movies (1982-1989)
All three Back To The Future movies (1985-1990)
All three Jurassic Park movies (1993-2001)
All four (to date) Harry Potter movies (2001-2005)
Star Trek movies II, III, IV, VI, VII and VIII (1979-1996)
ET: The Extraterrestrial (1982)
The Goonies (1985)
The Witches Of Eastwick (1987)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
Field Of Dreams (1989)
The Abyss (1989)
The Hunt For Red October (1990)
Die Hard 2 (1990)
Ghost (1990)
Backdraft (1991)
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)
Death Becomes Her (1992)
Alive (1993)
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
Forrest Gump (1994)
Twister (1996)
Mission: Impossible (1996)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Galaxy Quest (1999)
Pirates Of The Caribbean (2003)
War Of The Worlds (2005)