Kathleen Kennedy Is Breaking Out of Her <em>Star Wars</em> ‘Bubble’

Over the past half-century, Kathleen Kennedy has shaped Hollywood and molded mass culture, first as a producer of seminal blockbusters including E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, Gremlins, Back to the Future and Schindler’s List, and, for the last 14 years, as president of Lucasfilm and George Lucas’ handpicked heir, shepherding the Star Wars franchise under Walt Disney Co.

Kennedy, who stepped down at Lucasfilm in January after a turbulent run of recent Star Wars movies, has fashioned a new role for herself: Hollywood’s chaperone in the daunting new world of artificial intelligence. Over the past five years, she’s been privately convening a rotating cast of filmmakers, studio executives and Silicon Valley chieftains to talk about AI and the existential challenges it poses to creativity, labor and the underlying economics of the entertainment business.

“We weren’t trying to necessarily be secret. It’s just that there was a lot of anxiety around anybody talking about this very publicly,” Kennedy said on Wednesday night in an interview at Bloomberg’s Screentime conference in Los Angeles. “People are recognizing that we have a bit of a leadership void in the industry right now. Everybody’s looking for guidance as to how we’re going to go about using these tools.”

In August her meetings culminated with a larger, daylong gathering at the American Film Institute, where Kennedy chairs the board of trustees. In the session, which included AI demos and a general airing of anxieties about the technology, 150 industry luminaries considered the critical question of how filmmakers can use AI without displacing the creative people at the heart of the industry. “The group’s argument — and it is an argument, not yet an industry standard — is that such workflows should be understood as an evolution of existing digital production rather than as machine substitution for human authorship,” according to an article in the Ankler newsletter, which republished a document created by the group detailing its findings.

“Right now [AI] is kind of an evolution from special effects, but it’s moving very rapidly into more than that,” Kennedy said at Screentime. “Rather than just accepting the fact that this is going to happen to us inside the industry, I think what many of us are trying to do now is to find a way to be more proactive.”

One way they’re trying to be proactive is to quantify exactly how AI is affecting Hollywood. Kennedy said the group is working with Harvard University to measure how AI is being used in entertainment and to what extent it’s either displacing workers or creating new jobs. She suspects it’s probably automating the special effects business and perhaps replacing entry-level work. “It’s on the industry, and it’s on us as filmmakers, to then work with the next generation that’s coming into the business to try to articulate what are those paths that we’re creating for younger people.”

Kennedy has long harnessed digital technologies to advance filmmaking in her productions. In Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, computer-generated imagery replaced the practical effects and stop-motion animation that Hollywood had previously used to portray dinosaurs; in recent Star Wars installments like The Mandalorian, a wall of LED screens that Lucasfilm calls “the Volume” supplanted on-location shoots and green screens.

Kennedy said experience has informed her willingness to embrace AI and that she’s always been optimistic about technology. “Every single movie I’ve made in the last 15 or 20 years has been pushing technology to the next level,” she said. “There’s an opportunity using these new tools that give people access in a way that they haven’t had before.” AI can be particularly valuable in the pre-production phase of movies and TV shows, she said. “It allows you to be able to put something on its feet, get an idea of what it is you’re trying to create before you have to commit massive amounts of money, time and people. I think those are enormous benefits, and we’re just starting to get a sense of how that’s going to affect what we do.”

While Kennedy was generally sanguine about the overall state of the entertainment business, she said she’s closely watching the acquisition of the iconic, century-old Warner Bros. studio by Paramount Skydance Corp., and in particular Paramount chief David Ellison’s promise to maintain Warner’s cinematic output. “We’re all worried about that, to have a studio disappear and fewer movies get made,” she said. “We’ll see.”

Kennedy’s own experience running a studio inside of a big company hasn’t been entirely smooth. After successfully launching a new era of Star Wars movies in 2015 with JJ Abrams’ Episode VII – The Force Awakens, the studio produced several critical and commercial flops, most recently this year’s The Mandalorian and Grogu, which opened to one of the franchise’s worst box-office debuts — though it’s currently Disney’s most streamed movie.

Earlier this year, Kennedy moved her base of operations from the Lucasfilm offices in the Disney lot back to the offices of Kennedy/Marshall Co., which she founded with her husband, filmmaker Frank Marshall. She’s still producing films, including the forthcoming Star Wars: Starfighter, starring Ryan Gosling. But she’s also learning and listening and trying to prepare Hollywood for what’s coming.

“I have spent the last several months really just being very open-minded to looking around and trying to better understand where we’re headed,” she said. “It’s just absolutely extraordinary what is going on right now. And so, rather than form any real opinion or judgment about it, I’m just trying to absorb, and meet as many people that are involved in the new technology. I’m also trying to get reacquainted with people that I kind of lost track of, because you get a bit of a bubble when you’re doing something like Star Wars.”