Star Wars Live Action Show Gets A Title And Tasty Description From Producer Rick McCallum

[Brendon Connelly]

Already pretty deep into development, but so-far stalled due to budget and technical concerns, the live action Star Wars show is one of the great undelivered promises in modern TV (somewhere just behind season four of Veronica Mars and something, anything more for Firefly).

Producer Rick McCallum is going to be fielding a lot of questions about this show in the coming weeks as he takes to the road to promote Red Tails, the new Lucasfilm picture about the Tuskagee Airmen.

First on his case were the guys at IGN. They've posted a video of their chat with McCallum, at least as far as Star Wars talk goes. Here it is:



Should you be at work and unable to listen, or not have the requisite six minutes spare, here are a series of key points:

• 50 scripts have been completed
• The episodes are an hour long
• Each is "bigger" than "any of the prequels were"
• They take place between episode 3 and episode 4
• The working title is Star Wars: Underworld and the show is about the "underneath of what is going on", "the criminals, the gangs that are running like, you know Wall Street, basically running the United States"
• McCallum describes the show as "complex", "dark" and "adult"
• The budget could be as much as $5 million per episode
• But the show just can't be made for that at the moment
• The budget is high because there are lots of digitally animated characters

McCallum also makes a series of observations on cable TV and the state of the broadcasting nation, but they don't break down so nicely into bullet points.

I'm not sure we'll ever see this show. I hope we do, but I'm certainly not going to live in wait.

[_OM_]

The working title is Star Wars: Underworld and the show is about the "underneath of what is going on", "the criminals, the gangs that are running like, you know Wall Street, basically running the United States"

...So, to set the mood, the few surviving retired Jedis, Mon Mothma, and the foundation of the Rebellion all get together to stage an Occupy Coruscant sit-in, chanting "we're the 99% of the Force!" [thinks] ...Ahem, you kids *do* realize that by the time this series hits the airwaves, George Lucas will have moved into the freezing tube next to Walt Disney's, Harrison Ford will be in the SAG Old Actor's Home - probably in the room they reportedly built for Ronald Reagan but was never used - and both Mark Hammill and Carrie the Hutt will be drawing Social Insecurity without having to have their start date moved up by a judge. In other words, we won't get to enjoy/endure this, but our grandkids will.

God/Yahweh/Roddenberry help the little bastards...

...On a side note or two:

The budget is high because there are lots of digitally animated characters

...I'm gonna be lazy for a minute, and instead of going over to one of the 3D forums, I'll pose this question here: what's the maximum number of systems in a render farm 3D Studio will support? Seriously, if animation costs are so high, then you widen the bottleneck by building a render farm that'll allow for a minimum of two minutes of rendered hi-rez animation to be produced every 24 hours. Stick with barebones systems that are overclocked multicores with hi-power GPUs, small hard drives, and the OS trimmed of every single unnecessary process and/or service so as to dedicate as much total horsepower to rendering each frame as fast as possible. Such a barebones system could easily be built for under $500.00 USD, especially if the MB is one of those micro ATX types that you could literally fit in a cigar box and rack mount them in groups of a hundred. You could probably get them even cheaper if you bought them bulk from Dell and offered them a big "rendering systems by Dell" in the end credits.

...And once you've cut rendering costs by increasing the number of frames per day that can be produced, you cut costs even further by using only non-Mafi...er, "Union" labor for the boring stuff and saving the payroll splurging for the innovators, like the team that came up with the cloth physics plugin, or the guys and gals who take all those sketches and turn them into 3D meshes. Ergo, pay the grunts grunt wages and the artists artists' wages, and you'll wind up with more efficient use and result with your render farm.

[Meyeraustin]

Already pretty deep into development, but so-far stalled due to budget and technical concerns, the live action Star Wars show is one of the great undelivered promises in modern TV (somewhere just behind season four of Veronica Mars and something, anything more for Firefly).

Producer Rick McCallum is going to be fielding a lot of questions about this show in the coming weeks as he takes to the road to promote Red Tails, the new Lucasfilm picture about the Tuskagee Airmen.

First on his case were the guys at IGN. They've posted a video of their chat with McCallum, at least as far as Star Wars talk goes. Here it is:



Should you be at work and unable to listen, or not have the requisite six minutes spare, here are a series of key points:

• 50 scripts have been completed
• The episodes are an hour long
• Each is "bigger" than "any of the prequels were"
• They take place between episode 3 and episode 4
• The working title is Star Wars: Underworld and the show is about the "underneath of what is going on", "the criminals, the gangs that are running like, you know Wall Street, basically running the United States"
• McCallum describes the show as "complex", "dark" and "adult"
• The budget could be as much as $5 million per episode
• But the show just can't be made for that at the moment
• The budget is high because there are lots of digitally animated characters

McCallum also makes a series of observations on cable TV and the state of the broadcasting nation, but they don't break down so nicely into bullet points.

I'm not sure we'll ever see this show. I hope we do, but I'm certainly not going to live in wait.

This info has been bandied about for years. Looks like just as George Lucas' ham-handed take on Bush and the War on Terror weighed down Revenge of the Sith they will go for some equally subtle take on OWS for this series that will never happen.

[Blade X]

They should just do it as another animated series (either CGI or traditional hand drawn cel animation).

[Joe Kalicki]

I'm so sick of the between trilogies era.

Give us something after Return of the Jedi!

[Static-Pulse]

Such a barebones system could easily be built for under $500.00 USD, especially if the MB is one of those micro ATX types that you could literally fit in a cigar box and rack mount them in groups of a hundred.

Why build? Just use something like Amazon EC2 or Rackspace and have a virtual render farm when you need it. Using GPU's is nice, but I'm pretty sure most 3D software is content with a x86/x64 chip.

[FilmBuffRich]

So, why do all the creatures have to be CG creations? If there creation is a significant cost factor, then make them humans or humanoid. (Granted I know that we'll have Hutts in the show given its premise, but I don't think it's going to be all Hutts.) Lucas has been surrounded by a cadre of yes-men who just throw money at problems for so long, that he's lost the ability to be creative within constraints. Where the hell is Gary Kurtz when we need him?

[Agro23]

At $5 million per one hour episode it should be a slam-dunk.

Film two back-to-back as a pilot (or prequel) and release that into theaters. Use the box office haul to fund the rest of the series. People are still hungry for Star Wars stuff.

Hell, even a Lucasfilm Kickstarter would be a no-brainer.

[Joe Kalicki]

So, why do all the creatures have to be CG creations? If there creation is a significant cost factor, then make them humans or humanoid. (Granted I know that we'll have Hutts in the show given its premise, but I don't think it's going to be all Hutts.) Lucas has been surrounded by a cadre of yes-men who just throw money at problems for so long, that he's lost the ability to be creative within constraints. Where the hell is Gary Kurtz when we need him?

Why CGI for anything? Use some damn puppets already!

[Meyeraustin]

At $5 million per one hour episode it should be a slam-dunk.

Film two back-to-back as a pilot (or prequel) and release that into theaters. Use the box office haul to fund the rest of the series. People are still hungry for Star Wars stuff.

Hell, even a Lucasfilm Kickstarter would be a no-brainer.

Um...no. Clone Wars movie did quite bad in the theatres.