Friday, February 29, 2008

by Ari

Geoff Boucher of the Los Angeles Times has written a fantastic piece on the Skywalker Ranch. The article provides a fascinating tour of Lucas' filmmaking paradise, a 5,156-acre ranch used by many directors and musicians for its superb equipment, crew and privacy.

"Sean Penn and Paul Thomas Anderson were on the grounds at the same time working, respectively, on "Into the Wild" and "There Will Be Blood," and they kept tabs on each other's progress, chatting at the coffee stand.......These famous visitors are put up at the Skywalker Ranch Inn. It has 26 rooms each named after someone Lucas admires--there's Fellini and Steinbeck, Eisenstein and Gershwin. Each has themed décor--the bi-level Lillian Gish room, for instance, is frilly with stained-glass windows and floral mosaic tile above the claw-foot tub. They put me up in the John Ford apartment, a sort of luxury bunkhouse with a framed John Wayne poster and a shelf of books on Ireland, and I breathe a sigh of relief that I won't be showering in a Hitchcock suite"

How cool is that? I'd love to book a Fellini room for a couple nights.

" My favorite part of Skywalker Ranch is the library and archives (the archives I am allowed to see, at least; I'm told there's a secret building of large movie props, costumes and original scale models). Lucas started his own research library in 1978--its early duty was researching plot, wardrobe and design for "Raiders of the Lost Ark"--and a decade later, he purchased Paramount Pictures' collection of books, periodicals and clippings. Then in 2000, he scooped up the Universal library, which dates to the 1920s. The core Lucas collection is in a burnished library in the main house with a spiral wood staircase and stained-glass dome; the two older, imported archives fill a vast, climate-controlled building not far away."