Biz Briefs: Movies Made Easy

George Lucas is again breaking ground. The billionaire director, famous for blockbusters like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, has built a new empire. It’s the “ultimate digital studio,” he says, an antidote to celluloid’s costly chemical processing and vaunted studio system. The Letterman Digital Arts Center is a $350 million facility inside San Francisco’s Presidio, a national park overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. The idea is to advance production of digital films, games, special effects and animation–something Lucas has done for decades yet Hollywood hasn’t quite caught on to. “We make films for half or a third of the cost,” Lucas told TIME. “The film industry still has to go through the Internet phase.” Lucas and his colleagues pioneered the first nonlinear digital-editing systems, started Pixar in 1983 and developed the first computer-animation systems, which led to breakout hits like Toy Story and Finding Nemo. Hewlett-Packard plans to deliver 1,000 workstations and high-end storage equipment for producing video games and visual effects. Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron 64-bit processors drive Letterman’s computer network, the entertainment industry’s largest. As a result, one digital artist can churn out visuals that used to require six or more to complete. “Now that our capacity has expanded quite a bit,” says Lucas, “I think we can sort of outbid everybody.” –By Laura Locke/San Francisco