Muren celebrates ILM’s 50th anniversary at the place where it all began. By Clayton Sandell Dennis Muren was there at the beginning. As one of the first employees of George Lucas’s fledgling visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, Muren spent many long and intense hours working inside a nondescript industrial building in Van Nuys, California, helping bring the director’s Star Wars vision to life. Through their groundbreaking effects work on Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), Muren and his colleagues pioneered modern filmmaking from this former warehouse on Valjean Avenue, not far from a noisy airport. “It was a long time ago, but I remember everybody. All the people and making the film and the excitement of it not being a Hollywood movie – not a home movie – but it was a big movie,” Muren tells ILM.com. “And we were all on the same team working to get it done.” Dennis Muren at work on Star Wars: A New Hope at ILM’s original studio in Van Nuys, California (Credit: ILM & Lucasfilm). For the first time in about 50 years, the nine-time Academy Award winner recently came back for a tour of ILM’s original home to help celebrate the company’s golden anniversary. A lot has changed. “There’s a wall here I don’t even remember being there, dividing the two parts,” Muren points as he looks around the warehouse floor, a few steps from where the ILM model shop was set up back in the day. The floor plan of the building today – now home to a commercial sign company – is roughly the same as it was in 1975. As Muren walks the halls with his wife Zara, one second-floor room in particular brings back a galaxy of emotions. “That’s very memorable. Going back to the screening room,” Muren says. “It just brought back a flood of memories of the dailies. George would often come to the dailies, and he’d be looking at the shots over and over and deciding what’s going to work and what needs to be redone.” Muren is also reminded of the stress that faced the ILM crew as they rushed to finish the visual effects shots on time. “‘Are we going to get the show done on time?’” he remembers being a frequent worry. “We’d go over the storyboards there too, and the schedule was on the wall of the dailies room. We would say, ‘Look, we’ve got to get these shots this week or else we’re in trouble.’” The interior of ILM’s original facility, now a commercial sign company (Credit: Clayton Sandell). After his tour, Muren signs autographs and poses for pictures with fans who gather to sing “Happy Birthday” to ILM. He blows out candles on a special Darth Vader cake before introducing a screening of A New Hope for an audience seated in the same parking lot where some of the film’s most iconic shots were filmed. “Right here, [ILM modelmaker] Steve Gawley’s pickup truck would race by as fast as it could go, with [miniature and optical effects cameraman] Richard Edlund on the back of it with a VistaVision camera shooting the [surface of the]  Death Star as pyro was blowing up,” Muren tells the crowd. “That was a typical day,” he smiles. Muren attended the celebration over Star Wars Day weekend as a guest of the event organizers, My Valley Pass and On Location with Jared Cowan, a podcast hosted by movie location expert Jared Cowan. Dennis Muren greets fans in the original ILM facility’s parking lot, where some effects shots were created (Credit: Clayton Sandell). For more on ILM’s early history and the creative geniuses that changed moviemaking forever, check out Light & Magic, a two-season, nine-part documentary series now streaming on Disney+. – Clayton Sandell is a Star Wars author and enthusiast, TV storyteller, and a longtime fan of the creative people who keep Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound on the leading edge of visual effects and sound design. Follow him on Instagram (@claytonsandell) Bluesky (@claytonsandell.com) or X (@Clayton_Sandell).