J.W. Rinzler's Blog

JWR Update from Geneviève Rinzler

​Hi Everyone,
 
I am Genevieve Rinzler, Jonathan’s wife, and I wanted to reach out to Jonathan’s readers, some of whom have heard that he is experiencing health issues.
 
This past summer, Jonathan had been feeling particularly exhausted; he was losing his appetite and consequently quite a lot of weight. Near the end of August, he was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. 
 
As you can imagine, or may know from personal experience, it has been quite an emotional and scary journey for our daughters, our respective families, our close friends and myself.  We didn’t think it was fair to burden Jonathan’s readers with such a dire diagnosis but, at the same time, it didn’t feel quite right not to talk about it. Finally it was Jonathan’s dear friend Brandon Alinger who suggested to us that extending the circle of people in the know to all of JWR’s readers was the right thing to do.
 
Jonathan’s condition is serious and still precarious, but he has improved since the August health assessment. As of November 15th, he has already received 4 rounds of chemotherapy.  We are confident that he is in good hands with the medical team at Kaiser and UCSF.
 
There are more details on the Caring Bridge site, where my brother-in-law Ben Rinzler — who has suddenly been promoted to scribe, chauffeur, and assistant to the wife/nurse (many hats and no pay!) — has been posting almost daily updates. The site is going to be open to all. 
 
I want to thank you all for the love that you have expressed over the years to JWR by letting him know how much you enjoyed his books.  For those who want to reach out, be certain that Jonathan will be uplifted to hear from you.
 
For those who want to help I’ll share this:
 
JWR’s writings about the creative process of movie-making has brought him a lot of joy. But All Up is even closer to his heart, a book about the genesis of the space age. It’s written as fiction, but it’s largely based on true stories, delivered in an exciting read. It’s the “making-of” book for the most outstanding scientific accomplishment of the last century. 
 
All Up is the story of how an unlikely web of horrible wars, crazy research, epic failures, fabulous means, and the dreamers—always the dreamers—all came together, over half a century, to allow humanity to break the bondage of gravity and travel beyond our planet. 
 
Our present century has its own visionaries who are going to help humans land on another planet — to make the dream of the giants who preceded them happen.  If our current progress is the manifestation of past generations’ collective dreams and desires, then its genesis matters to us. We would be wise to learn about it, to be sure that we take part in the next phase of this dream…
 
So at this point, you should all know where I am going with this: 
If you want to help and have something fun to read, for yourself or as a gift to a friend/loved one, I suggest purchasing All Up!
 
Younger folks will hopefully be inspired to live their life with a deeper understanding about how our species is often propelled toward great positive change while in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. 
 
And older people who remember watching the moon landing will be surprised to read about the series of coincidences and seemingly unrelated events that contributed to the birth of the Space Age. JWR connects the dots and molds history into a thrilling new tale! 
 
Finally, personally, I loved the book! 
 
Thank you so much for your support for all of these years.
 - Geneviève
  
Caring Bridge site:
https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/jo...

Writing All Up — The Seven Year Foundation

Blog #1
  
While writing All Up, as I’ve done for all my books, I kept a running, dated chronology of my progress. I noted self-imposed deadlines, number of pages written, goals, and so on. It’s a way to set milestones, to keep to a schedule, to get the job done. My deadlines were reasonable but strict; I find myself a reasonable taskmaster. I do it because, otherwise, particularly for All Up, I would be toiling in a void-like purgatory. A structured schedule is a great way of remaining sane. It might not work for everyone, but does for me.
 
However, I never anticipated taking so long to write All Up. I underestimated the work and the research; I also ended up overwriting and had to spend months cutting things down. Yet it was all necessary. That was the “journey” (yes, an overused word) I had to take, and it was fascinating.
 
I offer these dates and the implied evolution to other writers and to anyone interested in one writer’s trajectory. It can be viewed as a cautionary tale or simply a nutty record of one man’s struggle with words and a cat (Stinky) that kept walking across the keyboard…
 
Thanks,
J. W. Rinzler
 
All Up, The Chronology
 
1962: Born. No intention of writing novels.
 
1969: Woken up by parents to watch moonwalk. Impressed.
 
2005: Visit Huntsville museum. See actual Saturn 5. Mind blown. Learn more about Operation Paperclip. Start playing with idea of writing a novel about first Space Age.
 
2005 to 2012: Idea gestates. Fear of not being able to do it. Write books on cinema, and a licensed YA novel about Indiana Jones (Indiana Jones and the Mystery of Mount Sinai).
 
That YA novel receives a very positive reader review on Amazon that makes me think I might be able to do a historical novel. Little did I know what was in store.
 
June 3, 2012: I start and, a month or so later, falter; work stops on novel.
 
February 19, 2013: I start again on All Up: Odyssey of the Rocketmen .
 
Spend roughly two hours a day for one year doing initial research for book while on bus commuting from Petaluma to San Francisco/Lucasfilm. Read dozens of books on Space Age, memoirs, bios, histories (see “Further Reading” on allupjwr.com or jwrinzler.com).
 
February 9, 2014: Complete 80,000-word rough research outline.
 
Begin work on turning that outline into rough draft (before/after day job): goal is to convert at least 5 pages of outline per day; 15 pages/week; 12 weeks to finish very rough draft.
 
May 2014: Late, but finish Very Rough Draft.
 
I give a chapter to my wife, Geneviève, to evaluate. Is it worth continuing? I always ask Geneviève to look at work that I’m not sure about; she is a natural editor. Gen says yes, continue.
 
I make a character list and divide book into five acts.
 
April 12, 2014: Begin writing “real” rough draft: two chapters/week; goal is to finish in 75 weeks, circa October 2015.
 
June 9, 2015: Ahead of schedule, finish Real Rough Draft; it’s approximately 276,000 words. I’m not worried about length. Big mistake.
 
June 19: Begin work on first draft.
 
November 28, 2015: FINISHED FIRST DRAFT.
 
December 21, 2015: Start second draft; novel still needs much work. (Note: During all of these early drafts, research continues.) Want to finish end of June 2016.
 
April 1, 2016: Finish second draft.
 
I give whole book to Geneviève to read and comment on.
 
April 25, 2016: Up till now I’ve worked, except for notes and miscellaneous, almost completely on laptop. I read and edit third draft on paper. Eyes and inner-ear read it differently on paper; important necessary step (for me).
 
Word count is dangerously high at 299,447; I still don’t care. Still big mistake.
 
July 23: Have incorporated my edits and Geneviève’s edits, and cut down word count to 259,603—third draft finished.
 
After more cuts, by August 26, 2016, fourth draft is down to 256,686 words.
 
I solicit criticism from readers—friends and family and professionals—about five of whom actually have time to read and comment.
 
Month or so later, better than expected feedback. I incorporate, make more changes.
 
September 29, 2016: Start looking for agent. This turns out to be one of the more frustrating experiences of my life.
 
October: Start what I’m calling fifth draft. (Date finished is unrecorded.)
 
May 8, 2017: With time between writing books on cinema, I decide to do a sixth draft. Geneviève re-reads whole thing. Word count now 231,808.
 
Still no agent.
 
October 8, 2017: On the advice of friend, I begin reading whole novel aloud, editing as I go. Makes a big difference to read out loud. Call it a seventh draft.
 
November 1,  2018: I decide to cut out Jack Parsons’ storyline; I can’t make it work in terms of Apollo 11; and there has been a lot of attention about Parsons, even a TV show; I’d be late to the party.
 
December 13, 2018: Major revision, more or less done. Novel now less than 160,000 words. Title shortened to All Up. Call it an eighth draft.
 
Wizard of Oz moment: I realize that the ideal agent has always been around: long-time family friend and veteran agent/publisher, Peter Beren.
 
April 2019: Beren masterminds solicitation plan; Permuted Press decides to publish All Up.
 
June 27: Start last polish/ninth draft; finish on September 30.
 
February 2020: Receive proofread version and re-read novel, making corrections and several simple but important improvements (tenth draft).
 
May 2020: Mind racked with existential problem: How can I explain to potential readers what kind of book this is in a few sentences—and get the word out? Marketing only goes so far.
 
Pray hourly…

The Rise and Fall of Star Wars, Blog #11

Curt, Steve, John, and Terry
 
That fall, producer Rick McCallum was pleased when Lucas moved Lucasfilm Corporate, about 200 of us, to our new home: Big Rock Ranch, about five-minutes east of Skywalker Ranch. You could walk over the hills from one “ranch” to the other, past a little observatory with a telescope; I made the journey a couple of times, but it took about 20 minutes and traversed a path otherwise occupied by enormous horned cattle that didn’t look happy to see me.
     We were the first occupants of Big Rock, a spectacular Frank Lloyd Wright–style compound, with an inner courtyard and fountains that formed an appropriate setting for a statue of Yoda, who was placed on a pedestal to greet visitors.
     Inside a high-ceilinged foyer, bejeweled with an original Gustav Klimt painting, we could look through tall, elongated windows onto a lake. When we arrived, there was only a soul patch of water at its bottom. When the rainy season hit, the basin filled up quickly and a family of ducks moved in. An even sleeker and more robust cappuccino machine had been installed not far from the Klimt, where coffee drinks were again free. (This was part of a SF filmmaking tradition, I believe: the first iteration of American Zoetrope had imported an espresso/cappuccino machine from Italy.)
      At first I shared an office with Leland Chee. Not long before I started, if an editor had wanted to know, say, what planet was the homeworld of an obscure alien species, they’d have to consult their mini-library of Star Wars reference books, which took time. So Lucy had decided to create a gigantic digital database for everything Star Wars, mostly in-world, but also containing a fair amount of real-world info. Leland was in charge of populating that Filemaker program. Consequently, every novel, short story, comic book, videogame plot, and roleplaying game went through his hands to make sure it fit continuity and so he could log its contents into his growing database.
        I couldn’t have done my job without him, and was constantly asking him questions, which he patiently answered. Early on I noticed that Leland was not listed on the mastheads of LucasBooks, our imprint, which went into every book and comic book we did. I suggested to Lucy that he should be on the masthead, and she agreed. Leland chose his own title, and “Keeper of the Holocron” was born. (A “Holocron,” I learned, was a Jedi storage device for that Order’s arcane lore and wisdom. And Leland, if you read this, please correct any mistakes of my memory.)
      After a few months, I was moved to an individual office and told I could choose which original licensing artworks would go up on my two designated walls. Because I was one of the last to move, the binder didn’t have much left, but I noticed way in the back a section called something like “Original Poster Art.” It was mostly still-lifes of flowers, but one had a written description that read something like, “American Graffiti—artwork.”
      On schedule, a friendly operations person showed up with, improbably, Mort Drucker’s original artwork for the American Graffiti poster. I couldn’t believe it. As soon as he left, and for every day afterward, I studied the Graffiti collage—for Drucker had done his pen-and-ink caricatures of Richard Dreyfuss (Curt), Ron Howard (Steve), Paul Le Mat (John), Charles Martin Smith (Terry), Wolfman Jack, et al, individually, then cut them out and composed them to make the 27 x 41 one-sheet poster.
      For years, visitors to my office were flabbergasted, but the Drucker was just part of Lucas’s vast art collection, which he shared with us, not realizing perhaps where certain paintings and drawings were winding up. (The second artwork in my office was the original painting for Clint Eastwood’s Escape from Alcatraz. It was suprisingly small, only about 10 by 16 inches high.) 
 
Overlook Ranch
 
Lucas had paid for Big Rock Ranch (BRR) out of his own pocket and we were his beneficiaries. As at Skywalker Ranch, every amenity was supplied and more, from an underground parking lot to a sophisticated heating and cooling system made of enormous pipes plunging deep into the earth, which kept the compound’s interior cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
     On either end of the main building were supplementary structures: to the east, a weight room with tiled showers and a day-care center. To the west, a footbridge spanned a lily pond populated with turtles, creating a picture that would have looked at home in a Monet painting. On the other side of the footbridge was a spacious cafeteria where one large wall was a mural in the style of Thomas Hart Benton depicting American industry. Next door was a company store and another state-of-the-art movie theater, with stadium seating, redwood paneling, and a giant screen. Of course it had a great sound system.
     Big Rock was so grandiose and spacious, it felt empty; meeting rooms abounded and additional rooms were so large that it worked out to something like 1,000 square-feet per employee (visiting Japanese licensees simply couldn’t believe it; one group I toured around went hog wild in the company store, spending about $750 per person). BRR had been built for 350 people, but we were only about 200 and we were never at capacity. Anyone could walk down the building length-wise, along its 50-yard east-west corridor, without meeting a soul. Large windows on empty stairwells stared eerily onto the still waters of the lake. Some began referring to our new luxury digs as “The Overlook,” after the haunted hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (taken from Stephen King’s novel), and it caught on.
      But this is not to knock it. We may have been, some of us at least, the happiest corporate serfs on the planet.
     All of this extravagance didn’t come cheap, however. Word was that BRR went way over budget. And because Lucasfilm was between prequel movies, a big layoff was said to be in the cards. At a company meeting in our new Big Rock theater, one executive made what would become a notorious claim, promising that no one “important” would be let go. 
    Substantial layoffs were announced shortly thereafter, and many people were let go, all of whom considered themselves “important.” Lucasfilm was not immune to corporate greed or folly, and in this instance proved itself to be like any other company, for we’d staff up a year or so later. Of course the layoffs were also an excuse for a few execs to get rid of those they considered dead weight. On the positive side, licensing did give six months to those being let go to find another job. Everyone I knew found another place to work before their term expired.
     Publishing was shaken up, too. I was taken off the George Lucas Books imprint and Lucy Wilson moved back to Skywalker Ranch, where she would eventually publish: Cinema by the Bay (on SF Bay Area filmmaking); Blockbusting (on movie financials); and Cause of Death (on medical statistics). A new publishing director was hired, Amy Gary, and I stayed on Star Wars, along with senior editor Sue Rostoni, who began handling novels and comic books around that time. (Sue and I would remain the two constants for about a decade.)
     There were further changes. In 2003 Lucas replaced Radley with Mich Chau, the former CFO. From Singapore, educated at Wellesley and Stanford Business School, Chau was profiled in Variety and quoted as saying that one of her career mantras was, “Have a clear moral compass.”
 
A Word About Licensing
 
Entrepreneur.com defines “licensing” as, “a business arrangement in which one company gives another company permission to manufacture its product for a specified payment.” For Lucasfilm, this meant licensing out the company IP to other companies—for a substantial sum—which then manufactured toys, comic books, sneakers, and hundreds of other products (thousands, over the years) based on Star Wars, using the appropriate logo and other copyrighted material, all subject to approval. For every item sold, licensing also collected a royalty.
      A brief history of licensing at Lucasfilm is as follows: 20th Century–Fox did not want to make Star Wars. The only notable exception at the studio was its production executive Alan Ladd, Jr., who had liked Graffiti, which he saw in a pre-release preview (a copy of the film was smuggled onto the lot for him to see), and signed up Lucas for his next film. The business arm of Fox, however, plotted against Ladd and Lucas, used stalling tactics to withhold preproduction money and delay the contract, hoping that they’d eventually go away. Turning the tables on them, Lucas enlisted the services of lawyers Tom Pollock, Jake Bloom, and Andy Rigrod, as well as his agent Jeff Berg, and took on the studio, saying in essence, “You want to negotiate? Okay, let’s negotiate every term.”
     When they started their battle, Graffiti was in limbo. The film’s financier and distributor, Universal Studios thought it was a turkey. But Fox delayed so long that Lucas and Graffiti producer Coppola, fresh off The Godfather, had the time to wrestle Universal to the ground and compel them to release Graffiti, which turned out to be a huge hit (still one of the greatest cost-to-profit earners ever, because it cost so little—about $800,000, earning to date $115,000,000, according to Boxoffice Mojo). Suddenly Lucas had more leverage in his negotiations with Fox. He also had more cash, and was able to pay for most of Star Wars’ preproduction himself. Contractually, his short-term goal with Fox was to ensure that only quality product was associated with his space fantasy film, which meant a few T-shirts, comic books, and lunchboxes, while avoiding inferior quality knockoffs. He and his lawyers thereby managed to acquire half the merchandising rights for Star Wars. Much more importantly, instead of more money for Lucas as director/writer, which they could have asked for based on Graffiti’s success—they were able seize the rights to the Star Wars sequels.
     Since then no studio has been so financially irresponsible (as far as I know), while Lucas and his allies have been credited with one of the better deals of the century.
     By 1979, Lucas was making real money from his first film’s licensing, so he was able to move Lucasfilm from its trailer in a parking lot across the street from Universal to the Olson Brothers Egg Company Depot, a building he purchased in the same vicinity. It was a case of location, location, location; he and Marcia Lucas figured that its value would only go up. They renovated the 30,000 square-feet old brick structure, turning it into a design statement that prefigured Skywalker and Big Rock Ranches. They had it structurally reinforced, planted green ficus to climb up the repaired exterior, added a humidified atrium in the interior with polarized skylights for tree growth (which anticipated the ranch’s Solarium), and a courtyard office with French doors and a family style kitchen (where Spielberg would famously make cookies for actors auditioning for Raiders of the Lost Ark). Into this masterwork moved Lucasfilm licensing, marketing, and publishing, with its first president, Charlie Weber.
     (I was once chatting with Bob Wilkins, who hosted a popular late night Bay Area TV show called Creature Features in the ’70s, which has since attained cult status. Apart from achieving local fame, he was the first to broadcast Night of the Living Dead, and I remember he brought author Anne Rice onto his minimalist set to talk about her new book, Interview with a Vampire. Locally, Wilkins was the only one paying attention to the genre, the only one to broadcast old horror movies, the good, the bad, and the horrible, as well as old Japanese monster flicks—while genteelly mocking it all, in suit, tie, and nerd glasses. Lucas wore similar glasses and must have been a big fan, for, Wilkins told me, he offered Wilkins the job of Lucasfilm president circa 1974. Wilkins declined. He passed away in 2009 and I spoke to him circa 2002.)
     Lucas christened his licensing division Black Falcon, Ltd. Because Fox owned half the licensing rights, it made sense to locate Lucasfilm corporate down south in order to keep an eye on the studio and their shared businesses.
      Years later in the Skywalker art archives I found many concept sketches for the Black Falcon logo. Lucas saw every detail as an opportunity to create art, or have it created, and went through dozens of designs before hitting on the right one. By contrast, during the early days of the new presidency, the logos of licensing, ILM, LucasArts, and Skywalker Sound were re-designed, each subsidiary’s iconic images—a lightsaber, a magician, etc.—were replaced with meaningless corporate swirls in a vain attempt to homogenize the different branches.
      Back in 1978, while prepping the first sequel, Lucas hadn’t gone back to the studio for financing. Instead, he shocked Fox by announcing that he would pay for The Empire Strikes Back himself. Thus began the real rise of Lucas and his franchise. Until then he’d been a glorified work-for-hire. By bankrolling his own film, Lucas took a calculated risk in a bid for real independence. Also, because he could go to any studio to distribute Empire, Fox had to give up an additional 40 percent of the licensing rights to Lucasfilm in order to remain the franchise distributor. (Fox still managed to keep 10 percent, though eventually Lucas would buy that back.)
      Empire turned out to be a hit, too, and Lucasfilm profited accordingly. The inevitable consequence was that Lucas decided to move his corporate HQ north to further consolidate his businesses (he’d already moved ILM up north in 1978). He also felt that Weber and others at the Egg Company were becoming tainted by the Hollywood life style; too many executives were driving Porsches, the story went. Lucas laid off Weber, and a few people were found offices at ILM or in scattered offices throughout Marin County. Most of the Egg Company was let go, and Lucas, reportedly, felt terrible about it. In fact, the Egg Company layoff prefigured the Big Rock layoff 20 years later in that people were given severance packages and six months to find another job. Lucas had also begun a pattern with Weber, his first president. Lucas had wanted to change things for a long while before finally acting, and hadn’t been overly communicative.
     “[The move north] happened two or three years earlier than I anticipated,’” Weber said. “It was sudden and somewhat abrupt.”
     (As for the renovated Egg Company, Marcia Lucas would retain ownership as part of their divorce settlement and eventually sold it. In 1994 it was razed for a parking lot; Marcia organized a wake for the building the day before.)
     As mentioned, licensing had died out by the mid-1980s when Black Falcon was merged into Lucasfilm and renamed the Licensing Division. Thanks to the first film of the Prequel Trilogy and canny licensing execs, by the time I arrived in 2001, the department had undergone another name change, to “Lucas Licensing”—and was an economic juggernaut.
 
Next: Revenge of the Sith

(Thanks to RobertRogerRossblogspot.com for the architectural info on The Egg Building.)
​
Bob Wilkins on Creature Features

10 Things You Might Not Know About the First Space Age

WORK IN THE TUNNEL, WOODCUT BY CONCENTRATION CAMP SURVIVOR DOMINIK ČERNÝ, 1952. MITTELBAU-DORA CONCENTRATION CAMP MEMORIAL
In the UK during World War II, experts at MI6 were on the tail of the German rocketeers—a search the ended up with England launching one of the biggest bombing raids of the War to knock out Peenemünde, Germany’s secret rocket facility.The assembly line for the V-2 rockets, master-minded by Wernher von Braun, was then moved underground, where slave labor at the Dora concentration camp toiled and where tens of thousands of these prisoners were killed or died of mistreatment.More V-2 rockets fell on Antwerp than on London, as the Germans desperately tried to cut off Ally supplies before the Battle of the Bulge.Wernher von Braun held the honorary rank of SS-Sturmbannführer in a political game of cat-and-mouse between the SS and regular German Army.As its technical director Von Braun led Adolph Hitler on a tour around Germany’s secret rocket facility. Years later, he toured President Eisenhower around the Marshall rocket facility in Huntsville, Alabama. A few years after that, he toured President Kennedy around same.Wernher von Braun has been placed at the UFO crash site at Roswell.That the Walt Disney/von Braun collaboration of three TV shows broadcast in the 1950s, includes a moment in which astronauts view a hidden base on the dark side of the Moon.That Hitler and his accolytes participated in occult magic and that, in America, Jack Parsons was a follower of Aleister Crowley, believed whole-heartedly in sex magic—and came up with a formula for rocket fuel based on ancient Greek fire, a formula that had more or less vanished from civilization.That Walt Disney was a Freemason, as were many prominent players in the first Space Age, which culminates with Buzz Aldrin bringing a Freemason Lodge flag to the Moon, and helping his Lodge form its first Moonbase on Earth.That the father of Russian rocketry Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was sent to a gulag, where he almost perished, before returning and eventually launching Sputnik and the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin.Bonus: That many high officials in the military and governments worldwide accept completely the existence of alien life, alien craft, and have never doubted it, including one of the German pioneers of rocketry Hermann Oberth. The First Space Age is replete with efforts to work within this framework, while keeping it as secret as the Manhattan Project.  
To find out more, read ALL UP: Odyssey of the Rocketmen , my historical fiction novel about the first Space Age. Reviews are IN:
“Hang on for the jet-propelled ride of your life. You won’t want to stop till you find out how it all comes out!”—Roy Thomas, writer/editor, member Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame
“Rinzler is a meticulous and thorough researcher—which is evident in his Star Wars making-of books—and that same dedication is on display here. All Up is long, intricate, and absorbing.”—Jamie Greene, Geek Dad online magazine

ALL UP on is on Amazon, iBooks, and Smashwords.

Writing on a cliff

Mercury Control room. I used this as a reference photo for a part that was cut from the book. My office is a blue recliner. I look out the window and I see the ocean. It’s a good setup. I generally work from about 7:30 am to 6 pm, with small breaks throughout. Around noon, I walk down the side of the cliff to water level—and back up, to get the heart beating. In the afternoons, I go the post office to get the mail, as it’s rural enough here that there’s no delivery. It’s meditative and it works.
 
My writing method is re-writing, to some degree. It’s rarely right the first time, though it happens. Dialogue and action are different. I can hear the characters speak, which seems to be true for many writers. So you end up taking dictation, or channeling. And action--well, I can see it happening, so that comes to describing it as vividly as possible. 
 
I keep myself interested and that usually means that the reader will also be interested.
 
I tend to base my stories, fiction and nonfiction, on a lot of research, mostly culled from nonfiction history and memoirs, and transcripts, though the Internet is a great tool for the odd detail or photograph. For All Up, one or two tidbits were communicated directly to me. 

Why i wrote all up

If you look at the way rocketeering and space exploration is treated these days book-wise and in our culture, most people know next to nothing about the Space Age (myself included until I started this project). I’ve always thought it amazing that bookstores don’t even have a section on space travel. Wars, all kinds of wars, yes. In my eyes what Gilruth, von Braun, Parsons, NASA, Korolev et al did during the first Space Age is arguably the most important single period of modern history. And as a species we owe it to ourselves to honor them—and to move forward.

April 11th, 2017

All Up first entry April 10, 2017

I write behind-the-scenes sagas. I used to do it in nonfiction when I worked for George Lucas at Lucasfilm. I wrote The Making of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. I also wrote The Complete Making of Indiana Jones. Though I was writing nonfiction, I was telling a story. Same problems: pacing, dialogue, drama. I had to keep the reader’s attention. A few of these were NY Times best-sellers.
 
Now I’m telling the behind-the-scenes story of the first Space Age, a true story. About 85% of the book is historically verifiable. But I’m doing it as a novel, so I can get into the heads of these historic personages, from Wernher von Braun, Jack Parsons, and Sergei Pavlovich Korolev to Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. This way, I can also delve into the more esoteric material, such as Freemasonry, cover-ups, and extra-terrestrials and alien ships, which are nearly impossible to verify 100% in the nonfiction world, but which find their places easily in a novel.
 
It’s an epic. Probably around 900 pages when published—but I promise it’s not boring. It’s for those who want deeper meanings, who want to look beyond what is, but who also want some solid entertainment. It’s taken me more than three years of research and writing to do it. A life-long goal ever since I visited the space museum in Huntsville and saw that many of the original rocketeers were former Nazis. You can see my complete research bibliograpy at jwrinzler.com.
 
For updates please follow me on Twitter @jwrinzler. You can also find me on Facebook.
 
 

Publishing Highlights and Things To Come

Last fall did turn out to be, probably, LucasBooks' biggest ever in terms of nonfiction/coffee-table books. Star Wars: The Jedi Path did really well; so did The Sounds of Star Wars and Star Wars: Year by Year. The Making of Star

Fantastic Fall

Indy Books on the Way

I haven't written a blog in a long time for one reason: Indiana Jones. We've been hard at it, preparing several titles for the launch of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on May 22. I've only just been able to come up for air (and now Clone Wars