The Kerner Company

For 27 years the warehouses at 3210 Kerner Boulevard in San Rafael's Canal district carried a sign reading The Kerner Company, and behind it Industrial Light and Magic built the effects for most of the biggest films of the age. George Lucas moved the shop up from Van Nuys in late 1978, during pre-production on The Empire Strikes Back, wanting distance from Hollywood. The anonymous name was, in his words, a deception designed to keep kids from rummaging through the garbage bins. What came out of the buildings on Kerner included the effects for Return of the Jedi, the Indiana Jones films, E.T., Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, the Star Wars prequels and the first Pirates of the Caribbean, and the THX sound system was developed in a screening room on the site. In 2005 ILM moved to the Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio of San Francisco as the work went digital. The model and miniature shop stayed behind under a management buyout as Kerner Optical, founded in August 2006, which built practical effects for the later Pirates films, Transformers, Iron Man and the 2009 Star Trek. It filed for bankruptcy in February 2011, shut in August, and its contents were auctioned off that October. A successor, 32Ten Studios, ran the stage until October 2023, when the lease was not renewed. A Millennium Falcon model and a Chewbacca head were still on the premises when the reporters came through. The landlord's plan is to turn the buildings back into ordinary warehouses, which is what they always claimed to be.