Industrial Light & Magic’s employees crafted otherworldly stories like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. But in real life, they were a lot more like characters from Meatballs, Animal House, and Caddyshack. 

That’s what’s revealed in Light & Magic, the new docuseries from filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan, which tells the rough-and-tumble tale of a historic visual effects company known to anyone who has seen a big-budget movie over the past half-century. The group of innovators who founded it forever altered the craft of moviemaking, creating entirely new ways of making the impossible look real. Unfortunately, the same wildness that made them so daring nearly caused the implosion of Star Wars when they were just starting out.

In the six-episode series debuting this week on Disney+, the men (and it was mostly men back then) work hard and play hard in a way that would give any modern HR rep a coronary. In fact, George Lucas, who assembled the company to create visuals for his space opera that no one else could envision, was hospitalized during the postproduction of Star Wars due to stress-induced chest pains. 

“It was like a fraternity house,” Lucas says in the doc. Four-time Oscar-winning effects supervisor Ken Ralston puts it another way: “George used to say give them enough pizza and beer and they’ll do anything.”

Kasdan, who cowrote The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders, and Return of the Jedi before launching his own career as a director, was on the periphery of Industrial Light & Magic’s birth, watching from the sidelines as the company brought to life the things he and Lucas wrote on the page. He made Light & Magic to better understand the people who gave life to his stories. His series doesn’t cast judgment on their antics—instead, it celebrates them. The doc also doesn’t suggest anyone got hurt in the process, except for the animator who broke his arm decades later while imitating a leaping dinosaur during a group exercise for Jurassic Park.

If anything, that freewheeling mindset is what made Industrial Light & Magic determined to cast aside tradition. “It was absolutely fundamental,” Kasdan tells Vanity Fair in a new interview. “That original group, those people who are now my age, they were crazy and fun. These people came out of the ’60s, and that spirit you’re talking about would be very foreign in a business today.” 

The sense of camaraderie bonded them when the work became especially painful, the problems harder to solve, the hours increasingly longer, and the pressure building. “They had to have enormous passion for the work,” Kasdan says. “They came together and created this organism that could do things the world had never seen before. And I think that comes with a sense of play.”

Among their countless innovations, Industrial Light & Magic built new camera systems to create deep-space aerial dogfights. They generated the illusion of gargantuan starships and space stations using itty-bitty models. They designed a whole universe of aliens, vehicles, and worlds that seemed both real and fantastical at the same time. The work they did in the mid-’70s changed everything in an industry that was still dangling models from strings or struggling to make the realism of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey seem more fast-paced and thrilling.

Breaking new ground on Star Wars was so all-consuming that the personal lives of these mostly 20-somethings could only be lived out in the margins at work. At one point during the postproduction of Star Wars, one of them acquired a military-grade shipping container and transformed it into a makeshift hot tub in the parking lot. It was big enough to comfortably fit two people, although one vintage photo in Light & Magic shows it stuffed uncomfortably with eight.

In the doc, Joe Johnston, the designer of the Millennium Falcon and Boba Fett and later the director of The Rocketeer, Jumanji, and Captain America, recalls adding another water feature to the premises. “My dad bought an aircraft escape chute at a surplus place. We used it as a Slip ’N Slide,” he says, amid photos of  soaked coworkers launching themselves down the inflatable slide onto the asphalt at the end.

Johnston was not just a breakout star from ILM but becomes one of the stars of Light & Magic. “To me, he is one of the most amazing because he can do anything,” Kasdan says. “He’s a great artist, you know? I mean, if I spent the rest of my life, I couldn’t do one drawing that looked like Joe Johnston’s, and he has done thousands of them. He could see the big picture and he worked his ass off all the time. I just find him amazing. Every time you see the archival footage of him, you say, ‘Wait, he’s doing that too?’ He’s pushing the [camera]. He’s making these speeders work. He does everything.”

The problem in the early days was that all of the team’s creative energy was haphazard. “We needed to get an adult in the room and say, ‘Look, this is what needs to happen!’ ” Lucas says in the series.

“They were in trouble,” Kasdan says. “Someone had to step in, because they had plenty of genius. There was a million tons of genius there. But there wasn’t a lot of organizational skills.”

John Dykstra, then the chief of ILM, was great at assembling a team. Leading one was another matter. 

Dykstra himself had developed cutting-edge effects for commercials and the 1972 sci-fi film Silent Running, and he knew the underground community of geeks, techies, and illustrators who became the company’s founding members. In addition to Johnston, he brought in stop-motion magician Phil Tippett, who manipulated the AT-AT Imperial walker battle in The Empire Strikes Back; Dennis Muren, who would go on to develop revolutionary CGI effects for Young Sherlock Holmes, Terminator 2, and Jurassic Park; and Richard Edlund, who figured out how to make a suburban house look like it imploded for Poltergeist.

The original Star Wars brought them together in the mid-’70s. As the film’s deadline loomed, they had developed clever new techniques without getting a lot of the actual work completed. “ILM would always say yes,” Kasdan says. “They never said, ‘We can’t do that. We can’t help you.’ They always said, ‘Yeah, that’s exciting! We’ll come up with something new for that.’ And they didn’t go to a toolbox that was already made. They’d say, ‘Well, we’ll take some of what we did here and create something new.’”

What they lacked was discipline. And as things fell behind, Lucas went to war with Dykstra, repeatedly clashing over what was going wrong or wasn’t happening at all. “I knew he was unhappy,” Dykstra says in Light & Magic. “I wasn’t sure if he was unhappy with me or the situation.”

“First of all, it was very lucky that they found each other,” Kasdan says of the pair. “That was great good fortune, and it certainly set the course of ILM for 50 years. But when they were actually dealing with each other on A New Hope, that was a time of enormous stress for both of them. For George, it was like, Is he ever gonna get to make a movie again? Is this gonna be a disaster?

“He didn’t have the money. He didn’t have the time. And he had picked a guy who was brilliant to run the thing, but Dykstra was not brilliant at organizing with him,” Kasdan continues. “He was brilliant at recruiting the right people. And encouraging and inspiring those people. They all looked up to him, but he did not have a method, a system to get the work done.”

One of the key “adults” brought in to save Star Wars—and the newborn ILM in the process—was production supervisor Patricia Rose Duignan, who became a kind of a den mother to this warehouse full of unruly lost boys. While they built models, blew them up, and made laser swords glow and created lifelike alien puppets, she and fellow manager George Mather devised a system to organize shots and create a steady workflow. 

“When I arrived for my interview…. I don’t want to use the word ‘shitty-looking place,’” she says in the doc. “It just looked like a dump.” The ratty couches arranged in a makeshift screening room; the equipment scattered everywhere; the hippieish team of employees who too often seemed adrift—her job was to straighten it all out.

She had to do that without crushing the spirit of play that made the company so revolutionary in the first place. Duignan encouraged the team to have as much fun as they liked, as long as the quota of shots kept being met. “The studio called us a country club,” she says in Light & Magic. “Yes, we were in the hot tub and waterslided. Yes, we were immature. But nobody worked harder. Nobody stayed later.”

Kasdan depicts Duignan as one of the key heroes who saved Star Wars. “Rose and other people came in and helped organize what was enormous creative energy,” he says. “Rose emanates a kind of energy that is very positive. She did have that gene that helped her organize when things were really going south. She said, ‘We’ll have a system for getting these shots,’ because they didn’t have that before her.”

But even the grown-up sometimes indulged in the wilder aspects of ILM life. “She was having fun too,” Kasdan says.

“We had a lot of parties,” Duignan says in the doc. “I’d mix punches and throw dry ice in it and it would gurgle and bubble—until I learned that was poison.”

The future felt uncertain as Star Wars drew closer to release, but hindsight tells us it all had a happy ending. The movie was heralded for effects that were not just exciting but groundbreaking. Industrial Light & Magic continued to grow, and much of the docuseries Light & Magic tracks the decades that followed. Not only did they continue doing pioneering work on films such as Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but divisions of the company were also spun off into other iconic brands.

The digital Avid editing software originated because Lucas asked ILM to devise a way to store film takes on a computer. The digital animation branch of ILM was sold off to become the animation powerhouse Pixar. Skywalker Sound emerged from the enhanced audio division of Lucas’s space saga.

The wild aspect of ILM adds a dose of flash and color, but Kasdan believes Light & Magic tells a story that’s inspiring about people who refused to conform—Lucas included. “Genius always requires that,” Kasdan says. “Otherwise you’re just like a journeyman. You’re just taking all the tools that already exist and you’re trying to put them together in new ways. You’re hoping for your best. George never thought that way. He thought: ‘I want to change the world. And I certainly wanna change the world of filmmaking. I want every aspect of it to be different from what it is now.’ Well…most people don’t think that way.”