Droidmaker: George Lucas And the Digital Revolution Reviews
Droidmaker: George Lucas And the Digital Revolution
The inside story of George Lucas, his intensely private company, and their work to revolutionize filmmaking. In the process, they made computer history. Discover the birth of Pixar, digital video editing, videogame avitars, THX sound, and a host of other icons of the media age. Lucas played a central role in the universe of entertainment technologies we see everyday.
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Rubin Gets It Right,
I am the Co-founder of Pixar, with Ed Catmull. After years of reading mangled “histories” of Lucasfilm/Pixar, I am extremely pleased to read one by a guy who gets it right, including the arts, the technologies, the businesses, and the personalities. Michael Rubin not only gets the gist correctly imparted, but also those pesky details. I watched Michael as he carefully reconstructed our history, never quite believing all the stories we fed him, checking and double-checking the stories of the participants against one another and against the written record. Often he caught us (me anyway) having unconsciously edited out boring bits of the truth, and he put those bits back in. His book has allowed me to celebrate again a wonderful time of my life and, surprisingly, to teach me new things. For example, I came away from my first read of his book better appreciating exactly what George Lucas and Steve Jobs (and Francis Coppola) contributed to our part of the digital revolution, it not being in either case what is often claimed for them.
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|An excellent telling of the story,
I was there to witness a great deal of the story. The book captures in great detail a story, a time, and place that was of great significance to me. (Now I don’t have to try and remember it all!) Rubin’s narrative rounded out parts of the saga I knew nothing about. It is really a strange feeling of destiny as I look back over the passion and inventiveness of those years and connect it all to the tools I use daily in my moviemaking today. The book is a unique historic document of a unique subject.
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|Not just for Lucas fans… this book is an education.,
There are countless books out there about George Lucas and his rise from film school know-it-all to cultural icon and even more books about how Lucasfilm came to be and how it changed the world of filmmaking. I’ve read a good number of these books and then essentially stopped reading them because they seemed to paint the same picture with a different brush. All the main points were there and while some of the small details were different, something was always missing from these books. I could never quite figure out what it was, but they left me with more questions than answers more times than not.
I think it might have been the fact that they focused so much on Lucas himself and that all the bit players who made things happen never got their due. The importance of the smaller guys in the company cannot be understated. Without each and every Lucasfilm employee, especially in the beginning, they would not be where they are today.
DROIDMAKER by Michael Rubin fills the void present in those Lucasfilm biographies by letting us know that Lucas wasn’t the only brain in the company. He was more like the Wizard of Oz himself – the idea man who made films and started a business while hoping others would bring the technology forward enough to meet his vision, which was way ahead of its time.
Most of the other “Lucasographies” I came across, while interesting, were flat at best. I wouldn’t call them books that I read with enthusiasm and excitement. They were what they were and according to Lucasfilm and other sources, including Rubin, they’re not all entirely factual. Given Lucas’ tendency to rewrite certain parts of history pertaining to Star Wars, I wasn’t sure what to believe or what not to believe – and perhaps that’s the intent – but Rubin’s book is indeed different from those other books. It’s an accurate account of events as they pertain to the technical revolution started by Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola – and it’s a bona fide page turner to boot. I found myself caught up in the parallel storylines and wanting to know what was going to happen next.
Again, I think the reason for this is that while the first couple of chapters dwell on Lucas and Coppola, roughly 80% of the piece features a whole different cast of characters, some of which I had never known about outside of the occasional mention in passing in another Lucasography. So in that aspect, the title itself is slightly misleading. You’re expecting to read a book that goes on and on about the genius of Lucas when instead you realize that the man is actually as human as the rest of us and when put in a corner, he just puts his trust in people he believes know what they’re doing.
Who does the book focus on, then? Just about everyone else who ever held a position at Lucasfilm, but there are two important characters in this story that you’d probably say were the “leads.” One’s a familiar name you might know and the other was a name I heard but never really knew well – Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, respectively. In fact, this book might be better titled, “The Adventures of Ed and Alvy.” Their story and years of history together truly is a remarkable journey and they cast of supporting actors provide the basis of a good screenplay in itself. Should Mr. Rubin ever decided to turn this into a film, I’ll be there to direct it!
DROIDMAKER starts off as most Lucasographies, going back to the early days of Lucas and Coppola – pre-American Zoetrope – and takes you through the different stages of Lucas up until the release of Star Wars in 1977. Keeping the focus of the book in mind, which is the digital revolution, certain aspects of this time period are given special attention. Coppola was just as driven (if not more) as Lucas at finding a better solution for editing features, for example. Coppola was eager to start using video while Lucas and his people were more into waiting for laserdisc technology to rear its ugly head.
As the book moves on past the first few chapters, the focus drifts away from Lucas and Coppola to Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, and there it stays for quite some time. Lucas takes a backseat for almost the rest of the book and even Coppola is mentioned more often at times. In any case, the story of Catmull and Smith is a great one, starting way back in their early days at NYIT and following the pair all the way to their Lucasfilm roles. Those roles, as you know, led to the creation of not only the Lucasfilm Computer Division but of a little company you might have heard of called Pixar.
Along the way you’ll be treated to such relevant side journeys like the creation of “motion blur” in animation, the first all digital, computer generated and fully animated Pixar-like film… and it’s not TOY STORY, and a great roller coaster ride of the history of the Atari company. There’s a great Lucas moment in that section where a bunch of suits are…
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