LSU alum shares his experience working for Lucasfilm

Mark Landry is a writer, director and sound editor for film and television in Los Angeles. The LSU alum and Louisiana native graduated in 2001 after founding the Cinema Club at LSU and launching the Outhouse Film Festival on campus. Now, Landry is the creator and writer of the new Titan Comics graphic novel series Bloodthirsty: One Nation Under Water (bloodthirstycomic.com), a unique spin on the vampire and detective genres set in a mythical version of New Orleans.

Here he tells 225 about his time as an intern at Lucasfilm where he selected and edited photos and wrote copy for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones websites right in the heart of the Star Wars universe.

“At the start of summer in the year 2000, I borrowed my mom’s Buick and drove from Lake Charles west across the country, and north up the California coast to San Rafael, where I was to intern for the mother of all production companies, Lucasfilm, located on the legendary and reclusive Skywalker Ranch. I was ready to turn my passion for cinema into a career—or die trying. I saw the internship as a kind of cosmic reward for having committed to making my dream a reality.

The sprawling, breathtakingly beautiful property on Lucas Valley Road, disguised as any old northern California ranch that had been handed down from generation to generation, held the secrets of the cinematic universe for most film geeks, and I had a responsibility to savor every ounce of the experience and use this power for good.

While George and the production team were in Australia shooting Attack of the Clones, the rest of the company worked happily away at furthering the brand, which included both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises.

Everyone seemed excited to go to work each day, their jobs were fun and interesting, and every now and then a deer would wander past my window. Having now worked in Hollywood for more than decade, I can safely say that the Skywalker Ranch experience was unique to the movie industry.

Now, more than ever, I feel the responsibility to use what I learned during that amazing summer, to squeeze out just a drop of the magic that I absorbed there, and to do the one thing that so many of us take for granted, but which is so essential to our lives: tell stories.”