Solo: A Star Wars Story the Official Guide [antikvár]

It's 1988 and I'm nine years old. My mom and i are in San Francisco, seeing the sights. Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, eating dim sum in Chinatown. And there's one other stop on our tour. A few years earlier, my dad had done some writing for this guy, George Lucas. The Star Wars guy. That was in the early eighties, before I was old enough to really appreciate it. But their past collaboration and friendship meant my mom and I were able to arrange a visit to the visual effects company that George had founded. The name alone quickened my nine-year-old pulse. Industrial Light & IVIagic. The fusion of technology and fantasy. The Idea that anything could be made real on a movie screen was both exhilarating and terrifying - that primal cocktail of emotions that fuels the Imagination of all children. The entrance to ILM was concealed in a nondescript storefront with blacked-out windows, like a top-secret government lab. iVIy mom and I got the tour, visiting each department; make-up effects, where I got to try on a mask for the highly anticipated Ghostbusters sequel; the camera department, where they were busy inventing new equipment; matte painting, that wondrous (and now sadly lost) art by which entire worlds were created with paint and ink to be indistinguishable from a photograph; and finally, the department I was most excited about: the model shop, where creatures, spaceships, sometimes even whole towns were built on the same scale as the action figures I played with on the floor of my bedroom. And there was no question, ILM made the best toys on earth. We also drove over to the warehouse where models were stored after use. If things go according to plan, in a few years, when George and Mellody open the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, you'll get the chance to see some of what I saw that day - the most wondrous toy chest on earth, filled with models of the Death Star, X-wlngs and Mon Calamarl star cruisers, rancors and Eborsisks, even a certain Lost Ark (which, incidentally, was not in a wooden crate marked "TOP SECRET/ARMY INTEL' but just sitting there on a shelf gathering dust). What I felt that day, wandering through that dark, quiet warehouse, was pure wonder. What I understood, for the first time in my life, was this: imagination is magic and magic is real. With the Insight of author Pablo Hidalgo and the help of the Lucasfilm image archive, DK's books are a little like that ILM toy chest I visited as a child. They are grimoires of magic, an access point to another galaxy, one that's growing larger, richer, more dangerous, more beautiful and more real every day. Enjoy it, reference it, devour the details, but be warned, the study of magic is serious business. It will lead you to dark corners of distant worlds, places no one else has ever visited. And before you know it, you're a magician too. At least, that's what happened to me. JON KASDAN Co-Writer on Solo: A Star Wars Story