Library footage and interviews by Lawrence Kasdan of the handful of white, really wealthy, ILM upper management. Totally tone deaf to the, in 2022, thousands of talented, creative, inventive, skilled workers who contributed to ILM's success for, in the end, substantially less than minimum wage - if any wage at all.
Even on Star Wars, for which the most attention was paid, only a dozen or so of ILM's staff where even shown much less credited.
It's disheartening to see the beginnings of the abusive, consuming, disastrous VFX industry clearly began in the 70s with George Lucas with "something for nothing", unreasonable working conditions, shunning and ghosting - and yet Mr. Kasdan is totally oblivious and makes no attempt to correlate the current state of the industry and the abuse of artists and supervisors.
The Kasdan take-away is: Look at these heroic, genius, innovators change the world.
The reality is: It's easy to appear to change the world when you give no credit, when you innovate on the backs of anonymous workers in working conditions not seen since the 1920s, and do it all using an unsustainable business model (John Dykstra demanding design change orders when in the middle of agreed production and then being ghosted and shunned by Lucas in retaliation).
I give it 5 stars for the library footage and limited perspective therein - can you imagine discussing Empire Strike Back and never mentioning Irv Kershner? You'll find it here!
Even on Star Wars, for which the most attention was paid, only a dozen or so of ILM's staff where even shown much less credited.
It's disheartening to see the beginnings of the abusive, consuming, disastrous VFX industry clearly began in the 70s with George Lucas with "something for nothing", unreasonable working conditions, shunning and ghosting - and yet Mr. Kasdan is totally oblivious and makes no attempt to correlate the current state of the industry and the abuse of artists and supervisors.
The Kasdan take-away is: Look at these heroic, genius, innovators change the world.
The reality is: It's easy to appear to change the world when you give no credit, when you innovate on the backs of anonymous workers in working conditions not seen since the 1920s, and do it all using an unsustainable business model (John Dykstra demanding design change orders when in the middle of agreed production and then being ghosted and shunned by Lucas in retaliation).
I give it 5 stars for the library footage and limited perspective therein - can you imagine discussing Empire Strike Back and never mentioning Irv Kershner? You'll find it here!