‘Star Wars’ Creator Plans Empire’s Move

SAN FRANCISCO —  The Force wants to move to San Francisco.

“Star Wars” creator George Lucas says he has outgrown bucolic Marin County and wants to build a campus for some of his firms across the bay in the Presidio, the historic Army post-turned-national park.

But the man whose scheduled May release of “Episode I: The Phantom Menace” is creating frenzied expectations among “Star Wars” aficionados, faces both stiff competition from other powerful would-be developers and close scrutiny from environmentalists and community groups.

Previous Roadblocks

In Los Angeles, an entertainment heavyweight like Lucas might be considered a shoo-in over lesser known commercial office builders in a head-on contest for development rights. But this is Northern California, a stubbornly un-star-struck place.

Back in the 1980s, Lucas wanted to build a digital production studio on two ranches he bought next to his Skywalker Ranch in Marin County. Environmentalists and neighbors torpedoed that plan, arguing that it would create too much traffic. After years of negotiations and a promise to dedicate 3,000 acres to open space, Lucas won the right in 1997 to build more offices, but no new studio, on the ranches.

Lucas will keep his Marin ranches as headquarters for his movie company Lucasfilm Ltd. and maintain up to 600 employees there. However, Lucasfilm President Gordon Radley says there is no room in Marin County for a campus that would bring together Lucas’ special effects, sound and software subsidiaries now scattered across Marin’s San Rafael in leased offices and warehouses.

“We’ve been looking for some place to get our businesses back in a common campus,” said Radley. “It makes good business sense and builds morale.”

If he wins the right to lease the Presidio site, about 1,500 Lucas employees would move to one of the hottest pieces of property in California.

Dramatically straddling the San Francisco headlands where the Golden Gate Bridge soars across the water to Marin, the 1,480-acre former fort offers stunning views of the bay, white sand beaches, miles of jogging paths and clusters of historic Mission Revival homes. And it is all just a few minutes’ drive from downtown San Francisco.

Congress agreed to make the Presidio a national park in 1994 but with a unique caveat: If the park is not financially self-sustaining by 2013, it will be broken up and sold to the highest bidders. The National Park Service’s presence was restricted to controlling Presidio perimeter beaches. President Clinton appointed the Presidio Trust, a board that is to develop the park’s leasable space and run its interior.

Magnet for Developers

With 6 million square feet of commercial, residential and warehouse space, the Presidio is attracting some of the biggest developers in the nation to its forested slopes. The trust hopes to prove that it can find tenants who can both pay top dollar and enhance the park.

Lucas is bidding for the first large site opened for redevelopment, 23 acres where the abandoned Letterman Military Hospital and an adjacent, empty military research laboratory now stand. The filmmaker faces three other deep-pocket developers in the competition. No one in San Francisco is willing to place bets publicly on who will win.

Real estate magnate Walter Shorenstein, a nationally known Democratic Party fund-raiser and the largest commercial real estate owner in San Francisco, has formed a partnership with the San Mateo-based Interland Corp. and wants to build a mix of housing and offices. The partnership is proposing CNET, the Internet news company, as a primary tenant.

Lennar Partners--one of the nation’s largest home builders--and Mariposa Management Co. want to build offices, apartments and a hotel, and Walsh Higgins, a Chicago-based hotel and office development company, is proposing a conference center for Marriott Hotels.

Radley said Lucas wants to build offices and a state-of-the-art digital center and production facility in the Presidio for four subsidiaries: Industrial Light & Magic, the Oscar-winning special-effects company; the THX Group, producer of sound systems for movie theaters and homes; LucasArts Entertainment Co., which makes computer games; and Lucas Learning Ltd., which makes educational software.

“We’re entering a brave new world of entertainment,” Radley said. “We don’t want to remake an MGM-type studio. We want a digital center for this new technology.”

The four finalists are supposed to unveil their designs at a public hearing March 24. The trust intends to select the winner in April.

The 10-story Letterman building, a concrete-and-glass box, is slated for demolition, along with the adjacent research building. Other buildings on the site have historical significance and will be refurbished. The trust promises that new structures will be more in keeping with the Mission Revival, red-roofed style of most of the Presidio’s buildings.

Successful redevelopment of Letterman “is absolutely critical to our financial self-sufficiency,” said James E. Meadows, executive director of the Presidio Trust. The trust expects to earn a minimum of $5 million annually from leasing the site, he said. The park’s annual operating budget is $26 million.

All four finalists have been told that they must include some element of public access to their projects and must design environmentally friendly campuses, Meadows said.

“The Presidio Trust is not a real estate organization,” Meadows said. “Our mind-set is not trying to extract the last dollar out of the Presidio. Our primary purpose is the preservation of this park.”

But environmentalists, park advocates and residents of neighborhoods surrounding the Presidio say the trust’s choices for Letterman may put too many people in the park and too many cars on local streets.

A 1994 National Park Service master plan for the Presidio envisioned leasing its buildings to nonprofit organizations and companies concerned with issues of environmental sustainability, said Brian Huse, Pacific Region director of the National Parks and Conservation Assn.

Neither Lucas nor the other three finalists for the Letterman site is that sort of business, Huse said.

“In the plan, the Presidio is envisioned to be a sustainable community working on the fundamentals of how we can become a sustainable society,” Huse said. “Developing commercials and movies with high-technology doesn’t contribute to that.”

More than 50 people turned out last week for the trust’s first public workshop on environmental issues involving the Letterman site. Some said the prospect of intensive commercial development frightens them.

“It’s hard not to be nervous about 900,000 square feet of new office space, or whatever it is going to be,” said Jennifer Gridley, president of the Cow Hollow Assn., which represents about 1,100 Marin residents.

The city of San Francisco has no say in how the Presidio is developed, because it is federal property. Still, San Francisco’s business community sees developers’ interest in the Presidio as more evidence that the city--after losing population and business to Silicon Valley in the 1980s and early 1990s--is again becoming the most desirable location in the Bay Area.

“We’re thrilled that four such strong proposals were chosen as finalists. Whichever one wins, we would be happy with it,” said Roberta Achtenberg, vice president of San Francisco’s Chamber of Commerce.

Achtenberg said San Francisco’s commercial and residential markets are so tight at the moment that the federally owned Presidio is viewed not as competition, but as an essential addition to the supply of leasable space.

In Marin, where they are used to affluent San Franciscans fleeing the city in favor of low-growth, low-rise communities, officials expressed shock that one of their biggest and best-known employers may prefer San Francisco to the suburbs.

“The impact of the potential move of Lucas and his spinoff companies would be a psychic blow to San Rafael and Marin County,” said San Rafael City Manager Rod Gould. “This is where he made his start. We hope he stays.”