In 1975, when George Lucas was recruiting people for the special effects work on Star Wars, he approached Douglas Trumbull, but he was unavailable as he was about to start working on Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Trumbull pointed Lucas towards Dykstra. Lucas formed his own special effects company, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), based in warehouse premises in Van Nuys, and appointed Dykstra to supervise the new team. This led to the development of the Dykstraflex motion-controlled camera, which enabled many of the film's groundbreaking effects to be produced. The system was made possible by the availability of off-the-shelf integrated-circuit RAM at relatively low cost and secondhand VistaVision cameras.
However, tensions arose between Dykstra and Lucas, the latter complaining that too much time and money was spent on developing the camera systems and that the effects team did not deliver all the shots that he had wanted causing the production to run behind schedule. These tensions would reportedly culminate with Dykstra's dismissal from ILM following Lucas' return from principal photography in London. Regardless, following the release of Star Wars, Dykstra and his team won Academy Awards for best special effects and special technical achievement.
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