Movies Made Easy

By Laura Locke/San Francisco

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