It had been nine months since I left LucasFilm. I had just turned 41. I had a 12 year old, a 6 year old and a 2 year old, as well as a wife that hadn’t worked in years, and I was close to running out of money. IBM had agreed to fund the new company and we were almost at closing. I could see the finish line. I didn’t realize we had only just begun.

We signed all documents in the opening weeks of the new year, 1993. The decision had been made several months ago (especially after the ILM braintrust had decided not to be involved), that DD would be located in LA, “where movies were made”, as my partners said…. not in the Bay Area where there was only George and Francis Coppola. My then wife decided that our family would not move to LA until the end of the school year. But I needed to be in LA asap, so I found a small place in Santa Monica and commuted for almost six months, flying backwards on Southwest Airlines every Monday morning and returning to Marin every Friday evening.

Cameron was nice enough to let me use a small office in Lightstorm’s three story office building. Every morning I would rise at about 6 AM, drink my coffee and head over to the office. I needed to find a location, start to hire staff, make decisions about and negotiate capital equipment purchases, figure out power needs, technical infrastructure, set up business affairs and thousands of other details needed to start a major digital VFX studio. Of course I had help…. Diane (my assistant from ILM) was invaluable and literally drove me like a dog. Her 14 year old daughter moved into my house in Marin and she moved in with me in Santa Monica. You can imagine the rumors. Diane was a great friend, a task master, an organizing machine, but that’s where the relationship ended. Interestingly enough that is not what several staff members thought.

I had hired an overweight African American woman to be DD’s Director of Human Resources. She came highly qualified, I think she worked for LA Metro beforehand. I guess the rumor mill had started that Diane and I were more than just living together.

In the beginning months of DD’s start up, Diane was focused and on point and didn’t suffer fools gladly. Some people started to complain about her “bedside manner” (not that I knew anything about that). Of course they went directly to the HR person. After a few complaints, this HR women allegedly said to one of our VP’s ” That must be some fine (expletive deleted) for Scott Ross to put up with that kinda shit!” This certain VP came and told me what she said and I headed to her office to check it out. Once our HR Director saw me, she squeezed herself out of her chair and started packing her office and was gone in 15 minutes. I never really had to say a word. She knew what she did, and she was gone, gone gone.

Every morning showing up at Lightstorm was a bit strange. There were rarely any people there. Albeit, I did arrive early. Generally it was me and the office manager and sometimes a tech or two. My office was down the hall from Cameron’s. Mine was a loaner office, about 6 feet x 8 feet. Jim’s office on the other hand took up about half the entire floor, it was awesome. Complete with a living room with couches, a big screen TV, a fully equipped kitchen, an office area with a huge desk and a conference table. The furnishings were expensive and ecclectic, replete with a samurai sword and the articulated arm and hand of a Terminator T 800 that Stan Winston had given Jim as a present. The T 800 armature stood on the corner of Camerons’ 10 foot or so desk.

Cameron’s office door was never locked, yet this was the dude that a few years before, sent an assistant with the T2 script locked in a briefcase to allow me and a few other ILM’ers the chance to read it.

At Lightstorm however, I could walk into Cameron’s office and hang out there by myself without anyone knowing. Every once in awhile the early warning system would go off and the Lightstorm team would scramble…. “JIM IS 15 MINUTES OUT!!!!”, the office manager would shout. Battle Stations, Battle Stations, defcon 5… vacuum the carpets, sweep the floors, stock the kitchen with tuna fish and peas, make sure the bathrooms are spotless.

During these drills, I would, at times, sneak into JC’s office and, well, organize the fingers on the T800 armature in such a way, that the middle intiger stood proudly at attention while the other digits were clenched in a fist. Childish, I know, but somehow oddly comforting. I am after all a prankster.

At this point, we needed our own space as DD started to collect personnel. Along with the IBM investment came three IBM board members and three IBM team members. It seemed that IBM techies, Brian and Joe wrote the plan that IBM was considering when they first thought about a digital studio. They joined up. And I felt that IBM would feel much more comfortable if I was to hire a CFO that wore IBM blue. A young twenty-something Chris McKibbin fit the bill nicely. I also needed an Exec Producer for Features and one for Commercials as I was going to organize DD in the same way I had organized ILM. At first two separate product offerings, feature film effects and expensive hi end commercials. Once we got these two running, we would add other products like video games, new media and ultimately feature production. That being the ultimate goal… producing our own content and moving away from the services for hire business.

But while the fledgling DD was still housed in Cameron’s office building and after the early warning system was sounded, I would as I said, “arrange” the T800 . Jim would walk in and see the T800’s clenched fist with outstanding middle finger and demand to know who did this. I never “fessed up”…Call it childish and petty, which it mos def was…. but for some strange reason, it made not being with my family a little bit more palatable.