
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/48434499/tfa_poster_wide_header-1536x864-324397389357.0.0.jpg)

The group was teleconferencing with Industrial Light & Magic, the San Francisco–based effects company, as well as a second unit in London, with the artists and technicians represented on-screen by their works in progress and on the sound system by their disembodied voices. Abrams was reviewing special-effects shots for his next film-known colloquially as “the hotly anticipated new Star Wars movie” and more formally as Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Abrams, a boyish 48, with wiry hair and black-framed nerd glasses, was seated in a small, plush screening room with a dozen or so associates, including visual-effects supervisor Roger Guyett and Abrams’s longtime producing partner Bryan Burk. One afternoon in March, at the offices of his Bad Robot production company, located in a nondescript two-story building on what passes for an industrial stretch of Santa Monica, the director J.
