Awesome book learned so much about t5he behind scenes you never get to read about. I cant wait for more books from Kimberlin

This book is not quite what it seems. I was expecting more about the story behind the making of the Star Wars movies. Instead it is one person's account of their time with Industrial Light and Magic. While it is interesting and does mention some of the author's and ILM's involvement with the Star Wars movie franchise, the majority of the book offers vignettes of various movies ILM was involved with as well as tells some interesting stories from the golden age of movie making.

As a life long Star Wars fan, I really wanted to love this book. Unfortunately, I found the book a bit disjointed. At first, I thought there was going to be a clear narrative arc, but the book lost any semblance of that very quickly. Kimberlin started working for Lucas on the final film of the original trilogy, so he does have some interesting anecdotes about Return of the Jedi in addition to a few he passes on from others who worked on the earlier films. Unfortunately, the book just didn’t have a clear structure. Instead it’s a mishmash of essays about the film industry, his life, and Star Wars, not not always thrown at you in a meaningful pattern.

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!

Really just a series of anecdotes and essays. Sometimes about the movie industry, often not. The book is a bit misleading in that Kimberlin didn't work on Star Wars until Return of the Jedi and maybe 20% of the book is about this topic. Another 30% of the book is about the author's time at Lucasfilm with the other 50% being about his personal life. While there are some interesting stories about Lucasfilm, none go into much depth. The book is all over the map as far as the structure goes. One chapter will be about Jurassic Park, the next about the history of his family. It reminded me of sitting down next to a retired fellow at a coffee shop and not being able to extract yourself for several hours.

This memoir of working with George Lucas contains some interesting tidbits, but lacks organization.

A nice, personal insight into what it was like working at Lucasfilm. I always find biographies like this interesting. As a child, you wonder what it's like to work for places like this.

This is for the Star Wars junky. If you live and breath that world you'll absolutely love everything to do with this book. I'm not one of those people, but still, I respect the level of attention and love put into this effort. If I can dig it, hardcore SW fans will adore it.

You probably don't know Bill Kimberlin's name, but it's almost a certainty that you have seen his work. Kimberlin, a special effects artist at Industrial Light and Magic for many years, was behind many of the memorable scenes of the Star Wars movies, Jurassic Park, and many more. In Inside the Star Wars Empire: A Memoir, Kimberlin reflects on his career in the movie business, telling story after story about movies and the people who make them.



Lest you get distracted by the title and cover illustration, Inside the Star Wars Empire isn't all about Star Wars. Fans of that great movie franchise will find plenty to love, but Kimberlin writes more broadly about ILM, George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch, and the many other Lucas films and side projects Kimberlin worked on. In addition, Kimberlim tells lots of anecdotes about movie history, and reflects on his own life and his family's history. At times, these subjects mix and mingle in a rambling way, but mostly they are fun to read.



The strongest thread through Inside the Star Wars Empire is Kimberlin's love of movies and joy he has experienced from being a part of the process. He's in love with the "magic to make it all happen--that rare mix of technology, money, business acumen, talent, and luck." In his role producing special effects, he "wanted to take temporary control of the viewer's brain and convince him or her that we were telling the truth, when we obviously were lying." And as he points out, we in the audience are coconspirators. We "love being fooled and scared."



While many of his stories have him rubbing shoulders with big-name stars, flying on private jets, or hanging out in cool locations, he also captures the day-to-day of the business. He writes, "if you could just get past the well-advertised but largely absent glamour of working in the movie business, it could be a hell of a lot of fun." The fun he experiences in the world of movies is contagious and his narrative of it is fun to read. If you love movies, especially George Lucas's many hits, you will enjoy this book.





Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!

Excellent perspective of the movie industry from an actual employee. He provided his point of view and his experience. I would like to see some pictures about the author during his experience.

Call me a geek but I do love Star Wars. So when I see a book written by someone who worked on the movies it was a no-brainer I needed to read it. Inside the Star Wars Empire by Bill Kimberlin details his time working for LucasFilm as part of ILM.

Maybe I went into the is book expecting too much but it left me feeling a bit lacking. Don’t get me wrong I am happy I had the opportunity to read it. Overall for something with Star Wars in the title it did not talk all that much about Star Wars.

As a teen, I worked in a movie theater so overall I am a bit of a film buff. I always read movie trivia on IMDB soon after seeing a film. Bill’s book is loaded with insights on a number of movies that ILM did special effects on.

However, in talking about various movies the author would go off on some odd tangents about his childhood or family history. For some of the tangents, it became clear why that story was applicable to the movie production. Others not so much.

Personally, some of the insights about Jurassic Park, Who Framed Rodger Rabbit, Forrest Gump and The Back To the Future movies was fascinating. Other readers if not fans of these movies may not find these parts of the book as interesting.

Overall if you are looking to find out more about the movie industry I would recommend this book. Anyone looking to read about Star Wars this may not be the book you are looking for.

Go behind the scenes of Star Wars, Back to the Future, Roger Rabbit, Jurassic Park, and more with the former visual effects director of ILM.

Great read for folks interesting in Star Wars, well-written and interesting!

I really didn't enjoy this book as formatting was hard to read also I found that I wasn't invested in anything thread happening.

I did think that while the formatting issues were annoying the writing wasn't bad I just couldn't get into it

Described as a memoir with juicy details about the countless blockbusters from Lucas Films, Inside the Star Wars Empire is by and about a man named Bill Kimberlin. He’s worked in the industry for years, and there’s little doubt that he’s picked up libraries worth of information about the field and the people in it.
Unfortunately I feel that this novel was marketed incorrectly; I was given the impression that I would be reading heavily about the behind the scenes for several movies (most obviously Star Wars, thanks to the title of the book) but what I received was a memoir about one man and some of the experiences he had while working on those films. I would argue that the novel is wholly a memoir, and barely a behind the scenes peek.
Maybe I’m being just a bit unfair there, as I was really looking forward to getting a behind the scenes look from somebody that spent years in the industry. I couldn’t wait to hear all of the funny stories, quirks, and tricks that went on behind the scenes for Star Wars and Jurassic Park (to name a couple). I felt pretty letdown with the product that was handed to me because of this.
Frankly, I would have been ok with that had the structure of this book been a bit more manageable. I’m the first one to fess up and say that I can easily get confused with different time periods and dates, so reading a novel where they’re constantly jumping around in time, talking about real world events left me lost and confused. I felt like half of what I was reading was lost due to my trying to figure out where in the timeline everything fit.
I do feel that Bill Kimberlin is an interesting man, and he certainly has a lot to say and share with us, but I also feel this novel could have used another round of editing. Just a bit more to make it more user friendly, so to speak. It could also benefit from a change in title (or marketing/description), since it is somewhat misleading at present.

I love reading anything that gives insight and personal stories into the process of how larger movies are made. However, I'm not quite familiar with all the terms or how the process works, so some explanation would have been helpful, but I understand that maybe going into this book the author excepts those interested to have knowledge of the subject at hand.

Some of the stories are hard to place on the time line as it seems to jump around a bit, but I do like the author's style. Some memoirs can be so bland, but this was fun and enlightening.

**I think it's worth noting that you should not go into this book thinking it's completely about the making of Star Wars; there may be some misconception there.

I was a bit disappointed with this book. I’m a fan of ILM and Star Wars and really thought that this would be an insightful look at the workings of the film company and perhaps learn about the work behind Jurassic Park and Back to the Future, but alas. The author mentions these topics but goes off on a tangent into his background and relatives, which is interesting and I don’t have any particular problem with. But it needs more information on the films the author has worked on. This is the reason a person would buy the book in the first place. Interesting but needs more editing. (

Thank you to NetGalley, Rowman & Littlefield, and Bill Kimberlin for the opportunity to read and review "Inside the Star Wars Empire: A Memoir".

I unfortunately had a tough time with this book. Ultimately I haven't finished it, but instead read about two thirds of it before becoming too flummoxed by the many bizarre tangents the stories within would go on. Being that I love Star Wars and am a big fan of ILM, this seemed like a great title to get an insider's view of the work that went into some of my favorite movies.

At times there's some really unique insights into ILM, George Lucas, the film industry at large, and even the author's own work that is fascinating. But more often than not the author sidetracks his stories to a lot of things that have little or nothing at all to even do with the film industry, or jumps from a really interesting story seemingly before it's finished to tell a different anecdote. The stories that do stay focused and on-topic, sadly often seem to fizzle out before they are fully told or at least left me feeling like there was more to hear but didn't get elaborated on.

I also realize this is a review copy before official release, but I've never read a book that felt like it needed an editor's touch as much as this. Unless something is wrong with my copy, stories often flow one from the next, to totally different topics without much in the way of chapters changing or anything that would indicate a particular story had ended and a new one had begun. As an example, one couple page section went from talking about the early days working at ILM into his side interest in acquiring cheap real estate and his missed opportunities therein, into discussing how the computer system Oracle was a large part of ILM's success. None of this with any segue. The other trouble is portions being almost overwritten. At another point in the book he mentions how a screening room was "hot miked so the projectionists could hear instructions from the directors". In the next sentence he stops to explain this already clear idea in essentially the same way, just to expound on the phrase "hot mike".

I think the section that ultimately was the nail in the coffin for me was right in the middle of talking about the location for the train scene from Back to the Future III. I love the Back to the Future movies and was excited to be learning a little about how this famous scene was conceived. But right in the middle of talking about the location, the author jumps ship and starts talking about an aunt who lived in the area who raced horses. At the end of this discursion he doesn't return to talking about Back to the Future and instead jumps into a different story altogether about Steve Job's Porsche, foley and ADR.

I really wanted to like this book and tried to keep forcing myself ahead several times. While there are some diamonds in the rough that gleam here and there (the effects shot SB19, the section on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and the story of his creating American Nitro in particular stick in my mind) it was just too choppy, and too consistently off the advertised topic to keep going. When you title a book "Inside the Star Wars Empire" you need to dedicate a heck of a lot more time to talking about Star Wars, or at least stick much more to the insider view of ILM. This book would have worked a lot better for me if it was titled "Inside Industrial Light and Magic" and kept just to stories dealing with the many projects worked on during his time there without any of the detours.

I was a little disappointed. I was hoping this whole book was on Star Wars. Had person in mind for it, too, as a gift. Still, for readers interested in the movie industry and this authors insider look at many popular films he's been involved with, this will be a terrific book!

I may be rating this a bit unfairly, but this is not the book that the publisher is selling it to be. Kimberlin worked at Industrial Light & Magic, worked on Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and other big name Hollywood films and there are bits about this in the book but it's in no way a "behind the scenes" of the work done or the process of making the special effects for these movies. This is really just the memoirs of a man who happened to work at ILM. Had Kimberlin been my grandfather or uncle, this probably would have been more interesting to me. As someone expecting a window into the early special effects done at ILM, a company that literally changed the way we watch movies, this was a huge let down. There are small tidbits about George Lucas, and chapters with Jurassic Park titles yet they house anecdotes of Kimberlin's life from that time, mentions of random people at ILM or from his side hustle, and other ramblings about how he saw the future coming when no on else did rather than breaking out the work done on such a seminal movie.
The book is broken up into chapters that one would think would help mark the passage of time and give a natural way to architect the "story" of the book, but Kimberlin jumps back and forth in time, will provide an anecdote sort of related to the chapter, and then jump back to his here and there/this and that disjointed storytelling method. This lead to repetition of stories and content and a pretty sluggish pacing.
I was just really looking for the book that was being promised to me, a memoir about being inside the Star Wars Empire and its related movies by someone who had a hand in it, not a personal memoir of a man's life who happened to work at ILM with the focus on his own personal history.