Starkillers and Skywalkers

Starkillers and Skywalkers

 Lucas in 1974, the year after the success of "American Graffiti." Lucas’s own relationship with technology, and its liberating potential, had started far earlier than film-school, in the hot-rod culture of far-suburban Modesto, an hour’s drive and a world away from the hills of San Francisco.
 (Only a near-fatal accident in 1962 led to his abandoning ambitions as a racecar driver.) Much like today’s smartphones, the endlessly customized hot-rods of Modesto were—as depicted lovingly in Lucas’ second outing as a director, American Graffiti—the technological means by which teenagers escaped the eye of their parents, encountered each other, and established and broadcast their own, nascent identity. It was a journey of self-
actualization through technology that even makes it into Star Wars, with Luke’s landspeeder standing in for Lucas’s beloved Autobianchi Bianchina; both of them left behind as their drivers moved on to larger emotional and technological pursuits. Lucas’s hope for Star Wars was ambitious but direct: to create a serial, in the tradition of the Flash Gordon films of his youth, whose proceeds would fund the independent production facility he dreamed of. But it was with the most essential part of his characters’ identities—their names—that Lucas began the project of writing Star Wars.

 He spent almost a year compiling lists of names—some used (Boba Fett, Darth Vader Jabba the Hutt, Princess Leia Organa, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Han Solo), many not (Mace Windy, Ford Xerxes XII, Thorpe, Zena, Bail, Valourm)—before he began work on the script. The name he would ultimately give to his compound in Marin County—Skywalker Ranch—would, however, come from a different source.

 In 1976, a month into filming Star Wars, the movie’s young hero still bore the name given him on the yellow-lined pages of Lucas’s original listing of names: Luke Starkiller. But that spring, a TV movie version of Vincent Bugliosi’s true-crime book Helter Skelter pushed the Manson Family Murders back into the news. “Starkiller” suddenly didn’t sound so good. "Skywalkers" were the workers who worked in the upper reaches of the Golden Gate bridge. Unlike Fett, Hutt, or Kenobi, however, the substitute, “Skywalker,” was not entirely a Lucas original. Instead, it was, like Apple and Lucasfilm itself, rooted in the Bay Area’s ambitious and exuberant relationship to technology. “Skywalkers” was the name given in the 1930s to the high-altitude ironworkers of the Golden Gate bridge, as its steel cables were laced across the fog-shrouded opening to the enormous San Francisco Bay.

 The superstructure of the bridge often soars above the ubiquitous river of cloud that flows into the deep,
rocky channel; those who trod its tracery during construction were, it appeared, truly walking on sky.
 It was across this bridge, a quintessential example of technological ambition and the natural sublime, that Lucas decamped to Marin County in 1974 to realize his and Coppola’s vision of “a futuristic plant that would place filmmaking squarely in the technological era.” And he was not alone in the exodus.

This was the Marin of the Whole Earth Catalog — lauded by Steve Jobs as “the Google of my own youth,” a newsprint compendium of geodesic domes and Volkswagen-camper-customization. Lucas embraced everything this modernizing world had to offer—except, apparently, when it came to his taste in architecture. The central building of Skywalker Ranch, begun in 1978, involved thousands of square feet of stained glass, multiple cupolas, and gingerbread detailing. Only eight years later, Steve Jobs, for the moment showing a similar bent, would be memorably photographed by his friend Diane Walker in his wood-beamed Palo Alto apartment, the room empty save for a high-end stereo, Jobs, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany lamp.

 But, beginning with the products whose proceeds funded their empires, Jobs and Lucas both would begin to craft their own, remarkable design visions.


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