George Lucas had a bold vision when he set out to make “Star Wars” in the mid-1970s.
He did not, however, have the technology to pull it off.
No one did, at least not at an affordable price.Douglas Trumbull had recently vaulted visual effects forward with his optical innovations for Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but his photorealistic presentation of space was based wholly in physical reality.
The space stations and ships in Kubrick’s masterpiece drifted gracefully in the cosmos.
Trumbull replicated this galactic ballet to eerie effect in his directorial debut “Silent Running,” on which he employed an upstart technophile named John Dykstra, who was eager to build on Trumbull’s inventions with a more dynamic application that would jar sci-fi flicks out of their reality-bound lethargy.When Lucas commenced work on “Star Wars” (via a go-with-god greenlight from 20th Century Fox’s Alan Ladd Jr….
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