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Demos to the Stars
There was this one unusual aspect of my first job…
My degree in neuroscience satisfied a lot of my curiosities, but was generally inapplicable to what I was doing the day after graduation. Throughout the summer of 1985 I was an intern at Lucasfilm. I had finished college in May and I did not want the job to end in August. I never wanted it to end; I was single-minded about making myself indispensable. My strategy was to become an expert at the company’s two new devices, the EditDroid and the SoundDroid. An EditDroid started at $150,000, and was starting to be sold in Hollywood. The SoundDroid started at $250,000 and was not yet available (although Michael Jackson had a deposit).
The EditDroid was very sexy. The company offered this editing system with a black curved tabletop and a curved dark plexiglass rear-projected video display and a SUN computer high resolution graphic display. They called it “The Death Star” console for a reason. The interface involved a KEM knob — a very familiar film controller — and a trackball. When it debuted at industry trade shows, it began with the trumpets of the Star Wars opening theme and in minutes there was a crowd gathered in every direction. People wanted to see an EditDroid.
The SoundDroid only existed in prototype, and was maintained in a room called “the sound pit” at Lucasfilm. The…
