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Posted in: Disney+, Star Wars, TV | Tagged: ronald d. moore, star wars
Star Wars: Lucas' "Underworld" Series Had 40+ Scripts Written: Moore
Ronald D. Moore (For All Mankind) shared how far along the writing was on George Lucas' unproduced pre-Disney Star Wars: Underground series.
Article Summary
- Ronald D. Moore discussed work on George Lucas' unproduced Star Wars: Underworld series.
- Moore, a renowned sci-fi writer, collaborated with others on the project at Skywalker Ranch.
- 40+ scripts were written for the live-action series bridging Episodes III and IV.
- Producer Rick McCallum stated the project was too costly at an estimated $40M per episode.
Star Wars producer Rick McCallum dropped a bit of a bombshell earlier this month when he revealed that Star Wars creator George Lucas had major plans for his franchise that would have bridged 2005's Revenge of the Sith and 1977's A New Hope, episodes III and IV of the Skywalker Saga, during the Young Indy Chroniclers podcast. The producer of the prequel trilogy shared that the ambitious project was to be called Star Wars: Underground, recruiting the "most wonderful writers in the world" with "over 60 scripts…like third draft scripts." Among them was Ronald D. Moore, who's worked on some of the biggest sci-fi franchises in Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and currently, For All Mankind. Appearing on The Sackhoff Show, the EP and writer opened up about the time when Lucasfilm contacted him and his meeting with Lucas and McCallum about the project.
Ronald D. Moore Reflects on Writing 'Star Wars: Underworld' with George Lucas and Rick McCallum
"Galactica was winding down. Caprica was starting right around that period. I got a call that George Lucas wants to meet with [me] about a possible series," Moore told host Katee Sackhoff. "So I meet with George … and producer Rick McCallum, and at that point, George wanted to do a live-action Star Wars TV series … What he wanted to do is he wanted to gather a group of writers together, kind of an international group of writers. So I was one of the Americans, and there were some from the UK and from Australia [and] New Zealand, and he would bring us together up at Skywalker Ranch for like a long weekend … We would go for these long weekends, or a week or something, at a time with George in a conference room at Skywalker Ranch and break these stories. Then we would go off for like another six weeks out by ourselves, write the scripts, then regather, talk about notes, do another group of scripts."
Moore explained the team met off and on over one to two years on the Star Wars project. "We would just gather, break up, gather, break and … we wrote something like, I think, 48 or 50 episodes … It's definitely in the 40s … And when we got to that point, George said, 'Okay, that's enough.' And he's then he wanted to just take those scripts, and he was just gonna go shoot them on his dime … In George's mind, it was, 'Once I've produced it, I'm just gonna then take it to a network and go 'Take it or leave it. This is what it is. I don't care what your notes are, I don't care what your thoughts are, it's done. Do you want it?'"
McCallum told Indy Chroniclers hosts Peter Holmstrom and Daniel Noa that the project would be too cost-prohibitive. The low-end figure per episode would have been $40 million, which is quite high considering this before Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm in 2012. Season one of Prime Video's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power costs $58 million per episode…in 2022 with better technology available.
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