John Dykstra

#1When George Lucas returned from shooting "Star Wars" in England, there was a problem waiting for him in Van Nuys.

#2The film still needed roughly 360 visual-effects shots. Fighters had to dive, chase, bank, and tear across the Death Star with an energy audiences hadn't really seen in a space movie before.

#3But the crew had very little finished footage.

#4What they did have was a warehouse filling up with models, modified equipment, new camera hardware, and experiments.

#5That warehouse was the first Industrial Light & Magic.

#6And John Dykstra was running the visual-effects operation.

#7From Dykstra's side, the delay made sense. Lucas wanted images that existing equipment couldn't produce. Before the crew could finish the shots, they had to invent the way to shoot them.

#8Lucas had a different problem.

#9He had to finish a movie.

#10So the first ILM was born inside a contradiction: Dykstra needed time to build tools nobody had, while Lucas needed those tools to start delivering finished images.

#11Neither problem could wait.

#12Dykstra hadn't spent his childhood plotting a career in visual effects.

#13His father was a mechanical engineer. Dykstra liked machinery, vehicles, photography, taking things apart and figuring out how they worked. He studied industrial design and made money as a plumber while he was in school.

#14Then he saw "2001: A Space Odyssey".

#15The images hit him differently. Here was a world that didn't exist, yet felt physical enough to enter.

#16That interest eventually pulled him toward Douglas Trumbull, one of the artists who had helped define the effects of "2001."

#17Around Trumbull, the usual job boundaries didn't mean much. A model problem could become a camera problem. A camera problem could become an engineering problem. Dykstra worked on projects including "The Andromeda Strain" and "Silent Running", moving between design, models, photography, and mechanical systems.

#18He also noticed the limit of the tools.

#19A miniature could be beautiful, but if the camera couldn't move the way the shot needed, the spaceship still felt stuck.

#20That problem followed him.

#21Dykstra's next useful stop wasn't Hollywood.

#22It was the UC Berkeley Environmental Simulation Laboratory.

#23Researchers there used miniature environments and computer-controlled cameras to study how people responded to simulated spaces.

#24Dykstra didn't invent motion control there from scratch. The system already existed in some form. What he gained was experience in a place where optics, mechanics, camera movement, and computer control all had to work together.

#25He also worked alongside Jerry Jeffress and Alvah Miller.

#26At the time, they weren't building X-wings.

#27A few years later, those people and those skills would show up in exactly the place Lucas needed them.

#28Lucas originally went to Douglas Trumbull for the effects job.

#29Trumbull couldn't take it. He was busy with "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".

#30So he sent Lucas to Dykstra.

#31Lucas's request wasn't simply to make good-looking spaceships. He wanted the ships to fight like World War II aircraft.

#32Dive. Bank. Pursue. Rush past the camera.

#33A miniature sitting on a stage couldn't do that.

#34So Dykstra's team flipped the problem.

#35If the ship couldn't fly, move the camera.

#36And make the camera repeat that movement exactly.

#37That second part mattered. The crew could shoot a model on one pass, lighting elements on another, stars or laser effects separately, then combine everything later—if the camera traveled the same path each time.

#38That work became the Dykstraflex system.

#39The name makes it sound like Dykstra built it alone.

#40He didn't.

#41Alvah Miller and Jerry Jeffress were deeply involved in control and engineering. Richard Edlund worked on the photography side. Richard Alexander, Don Trumbull, Bill Shourt, and others helped turn the idea into something that could survive a film production.

#42Dykstra's skill wasn't doing every job himself.

#43It was putting very different people around the same impossible problem.

#44The Van Nuys shop didn't resemble the institution ILM would later become.

#45Grant McCune handled miniature work. Richard Edlund helped develop the photography systems. Engineers built hardware while artists figured out what the hardware needed to do.

#46A young Dennis Muren joined.

#47So did Joe Johnston, who gave one of the most revealing answers of the whole era.

#48Grant McCune asked whether he could paint a model.

#49Johnston hadn't done it before.

#50He said yes anyway.

#51Then he learned.

#52That attitude fit the place. The problems didn't respect job titles, so the crew couldn't afford to respect them too much either.

#53Dykstra later remembered the operation as something like a super-garage.

#54That freedom produced ideas fast.

#55It could also look completely out of control.

#56One day, some crew members were sitting in a hot tub while Dykstra used a forklift to drop a refrigerator. Then people from Lucas's side arrived.

#57The movie was behind schedule.

#58The crew looked like it was at a party.

#59And the guy in charge was smashing appliances.

#60Except the refrigerator actually had a purpose. Ben Burtt needed a sound for the film.

#61So the scene was almost a perfect picture of the first ILM.

#62They really were working.

#63And they really were in trouble.

#64Dykstra's crew had built remarkable equipment.

#65Lucas needed shots.

#66That difference drove the tension.

#67From Dykstra's point of view, there was no shortcut. The crew couldn't deliver images from a system that hadn't been invented, tested, and refined yet.

#68From Lucas's point of view, the system could be ingenious and still fail him if the movie missed its schedule.

#69So the shop tightened up.

#70George Mather tracked the many separate pieces moving through individual effects shots. Rose Duignan helped bring more production structure to an operation that had grown fast and loose.

#71The shifts got brutal. People worked extraordinary hours and sometimes slept in the building.

#72The experimental workshop had to become a production machine.

#73Then, finally, it started producing the thing Lucas had been waiting for.

#74Shots.

#75The clever part of Dykstraflex wasn't that audiences would notice the machine.

#76They weren't supposed to.

#77The camera could move around a miniature, remember that motion, and repeat it with remarkable precision. Different image elements could be photographed separately and combined.

#78The result felt fast.

#79X-wings didn't drift through space.

#80They attacked.

#81The miniature itself wasn't really flying.

#82The point of view was.

#83When "Star Wars" opened in 1977, the production crisis flipped into a triumph.

#84The film became a phenomenon. Dykstra shared the Academy Award for visual effects with John Stears, Richard Edlund, Grant McCune, and Robert Blalack. The electronic motion-control work developed by Dykstra, Alvah Miller, and Jerry Jeffress also received technical recognition from the Academy.

#85Months earlier, that machinery had looked like something that might help sink the schedule.

#86Now it looked like the future.

#87Which makes what happened next feel strange.

#88Dykstra didn't lead ILM into the sequel.

#89It's easy to picture ILM in 1977 as the first version of the permanent company everyone knows now.

#90It wasn't.

#91The original operation had been built largely to finish one film. Once the work ended, the crew scattered.

#92By June 1977, there were no employees left on the ILM payroll.

#93So saying Lucas simply fired Dykstra from the famous company he had helped build misses something important.

#94There wasn't yet a permanent famous company to be fired from.

#95The first ILM itself had effectively stopped.

#96The people still needed jobs, though.

#97Dykstra joined Grant McCune, Richard Alexander, Alvah Miller, Lorne Peterson, Richard Edlund, and others in a new company called Apogee.

#98And almost immediately, the people who had just made one famous space war were asked to make another.

#99"Battlestar Galactica" had fighters, giant ships, and big space battles.

#100A lot of former ILM people worked on it.

#101Some equipment from the original shop—still owned by Lucas—was rented for the production.

#102Soon, the visual language created for "Star Wars" was turning up in another space adventure. Later, Fox and Universal ended up in legal disputes over similarities between the two properties.

#103It's tempting to turn this into a clean story of betrayal.

#104The evidence doesn't give us one.

#105The original ILM had already dispersed. The crew needed work. Lucas and Dykstra had genuinely clashed over production during "Star Wars," but there isn't one neatly documented event that explains their entire split.

#106What happened next is clearer.

#107Lucas decided to make "The Empire Strikes Back".

#108He needed ILM again.

#109But he had to rebuild it.

#110Richard Edlund returned.

#111Dennis Muren became part of the rebuilt operation. Joe Johnston kept working in Lucas's world.

#112New people joined them in Northern California, and ILM began turning into the lasting institution that would dominate visual effects for decades.

#113Dykstra wasn't there.

#114That's the paradox.

#115One of the key people who had assembled the first ILM was gone, but people from that first shop were becoming the foundation of the next one.

#116Dennis Muren is the clearest example.

#117He had entered the original operation as a young effects cameraman after interviewing with Dykstra and Edlund.

#118Over time, Muren would become one of the defining people in ILM's history.

#119Dykstra left.

#120Some of what he'd helped build didn't.

#121It lived inside the people.

#122ILM learned to continue without Dykstra.

#123Now Dykstra had to prove he could continue without ILM.

#124Dykstra kept working through Apogee. On "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", he crossed paths again with his old mentor Douglas Trumbull. More visual-effects work followed.

#125But eventually he ran into a bigger problem than any disagreement with Lucas.

#126His signature technology was aging.

#127Physical miniatures. Precision camera rigs. Multiple film passes. Optical compositing.

#128Then computer-generated imagery began pushing into the center of filmmaking.

#129"Terminator 2: Judgment Day" changed expectations for digital characters. "Jurassic Park" changed them again.

#130And one of the companies driving that shift was the ILM Dykstra had left.

#131There was a sharp irony in that.

#132Dykstra had once helped overthrow an older way of making effects.

#133Now a newer way was beginning to overthrow his.

#134He could have spent the rest of his career defending the method that carried his name.

#135He didn't.

#136At Sony Pictures Imageworks, Dykstra moved deeper into digital visual effects.

#137"Stuart Little" needed a computer-generated mouse to feel as though he truly occupied the same world as live actors.

#138Then came "Spider-Man."

#139The tools were almost unrecognizable compared with the Van Nuys days.

#140The problem wasn't.

#141An X-wing couldn't really fly through space.

#142Spider-Man couldn't really swing through Manhattan at superhero speed.

#143Both jobs asked the same basic question: how do you make impossible motion feel believable?

#144In the 1970s, a computer helped control Dykstra's physical camera.

#145Now computers could help create the character, the environment, and the camera itself.

#146And Dykstra didn't become a digital purist.

#147"Spider-Man 2" makes that clear. When Doctor Octopus's mechanical tentacles could work physically on set, the production used practical puppets. Teams of puppeteers could be needed to operate them.

#148When the shot demanded movement a physical rig couldn't deliver, the tentacles went digital.

#149The newest tool wasn't automatically the answer.

#150The believable shot was the answer.

#151That principle would have fit perfectly inside the first ILM.

#152In 2005, "Spider-Man 2" won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

#153It was Dykstra's second competitive visual-effects Oscar.

#154The first had come for "Star Wars."

#155About twenty-seven years separated them.

#156At the time of the first, computers were helping move real cameras around real miniatures.

#157By the second, characters, environments, and cameras could exist partly or entirely inside a computer.

#158Dykstraflex wasn't the future anymore.

#159Dykstra was still working in it.

#160He had managed to outlast the technology that made his name.

#161In 2017, veterans of the original "Star Wars" effects crew reunited at a former ILM facility in San Rafael.

#162Rose Duignan helped organize it. Richard Edlund, Lorne Peterson, Joe Johnston, Al Miller, and other old colleagues came.

#163So did Dykstra.

#164He brought his "Star Wars" Oscar with him.

#165And there was one detail that made the location especially strange.

#166It was Dykstra's first visit to that San Rafael facility.

#167He had been central to the first ILM in Van Nuys, but San Rafael belonged to the version of ILM that grew up without him.

#168Four decades later, he finally stepped inside that part of the company's history.

#169What he talked about afterward wasn't simply the machine with his name on it.

#170He remembered the people.

#171Departments knew what other departments were doing. If one person improved their part of the work, somebody farther down the chain could benefit too.

#172That was what stayed with him.

#173Back in 1976, that crew had looked dangerous.

#174It was dangerous.

#175The schedule problem was real. The money pressure was real. Lucas's frustration was real.

#176But the warehouse produced more than Dykstraflex.

#177It produced people who carried what they'd learned into ILM, Apogee, other companies, and entirely different careers.

#178Dykstra did something similar with himself.

#179When the method that had made him famous stopped being the answer, he didn't make the method sacred.

#180He found another one.

#181Maybe that's what lasted longest from the first ILM.

#182Not one camera.

#183The habit of building a new method when the old one couldn't do the job.

#184Dennis Muren came to the first "Star Wars" operation as a young effects cameraman and interviewed with John Dykstra and Richard Edlund.

#185Then the paths flipped.

#186Dykstra left ILM.

#187Muren stayed—and remained near the center of the company through "The Empire Strikes Back," "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," and "Jurassic Park," even as the technology around him kept changing.

#188The man who helped hire him was gone.

#189The young cameraman was still there decades later.

#190How did one job on a strange space movie turn Dennis Muren into one of the people who carried ILM through multiple visual-effects revolutions?