Merrick here...
CzechPosition has an interview with Rick McCallum about the long-in-development STAR WARS live action television series we've been hearing about. Sounds like it's still a ways off, apparently the scale and complexity of the show makes it not affordable/impractical for television - at the moment.
Select quotes appear below for your consideration. Per CzechPosition, McCallum reveals...
“We have 50 hours of third-draft scripts, but the problem we have is there is a lot of digital animation; we don’t have the technology yet to be able to do them at a price that is safe for television. Since we would be financing them, it would be suicide for us to do this [now]. So we are going to wait three or four years,” he said.
[EDIT]
“Network television and cable television as we know it are completely imploding, so we’re not really sure that in five years’ time we can release a dramatic one-hour episode because it is all reality TV now,
[EDIT]
“It takes place between episodes three and four, when Luke Skywalker was growing up as a teenager, but it has nothing to do with Luke,” he said, adding that there is no young Luke Skywalker in any of the episodes. Episode three, “Revenge of the Sith” covers the time up until Luke’s birth. Episode four — the original “Star Wars” released in 1977, later called “A New Hope”— finds Luke at the start of his involvement with the Rebel Alliance. “Basically, it is like ‘The Godfather’; it’s the Empire slowly building up its power base around the galaxy, what happens in Coruscant, which is the major capital, and it’s [about] a group of underground bosses who live there and control drugs, prostitution,” McCallum said.
Reveals the article, the entirety of which can be found HERE. There are a few more STAR WARS details discussed, as well as a bit of insight into the status of Lucasfilms' forthcoming Tuskegee Airmen adventure REDTAILS. Be sure to check it out!
This is so frustrating. Sounds like they're making a television series involving all the elements I don't find particularly interesting about STAR WARS - turgid minutiae. Hopefully such concerns won't bear out in the long run, but I'm reminded of the ramp-up to STAR WARS EPISODE I. I.e. we were told Lucas was waiting for technology to catch-up to his vision before he could realize it, but look what we got when all was said and done.
McCallum does mention Coruscant and prostitution, so maybe this guy could be in the new show?
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