Special Effects Man

Kimberlin, Bill.  Inside the Star Wars Empire: A Memoir.  Guilford, CN: Lyons Press, 2018.

If you Google Bill Kimberlin, you will find out that he has credits for special effects for a number of well known movies including Return of the Jedi, Mars Attacks, Back to the Future II & III, among others.  You would also find out that he directed/produced/edited/filmed American Nitro, a documentary on drag racing.  But that is not all to his life.

Inside the Star Wars Empire: A Memoir is a story of Bill Kimberlin's life told in short, wandering, non-sequential chapters.  In a major way, the subtitle is the important term in defining the book's purpose since he is telling his story, not a history of Star Wars, or Industrial Light & Magic (ILM).

Bill Kimberlin opens with chapters on his first job at ILM, doing the special effects for the space battles on Return of the Jedi,  so we learn what life was like working at ILM.  But he also intersperses chapters on his life before and outside ILM to the mix.  We learn about the movies he made (American Nitro and Jeffries-Johnson 1910), his family background (bootlegging and Pretty Boy Floyd included), and his life ambitions/goals.  He is not afraid to name-drop along the way as he tells about various movies he worked on and the effects he helped create.

If the reader is wanting the inside scoop on Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic, he may be disappointed, but if he or she is looking for a life story spent in the trenches of film magic, Inside the Star Wars Empire: A Memoir may just be the ticket!