Ronald D. Moore Discusses George Lucas' Scrapped STAR WARS: UNDERWORLD Series
As you all know by now, George Lucas was developing a live-action Star Wars series titled Star Wars: Underworld before he sold Lucasfilm off to Disney. There was a lot of work done on the series and according to previous reports, he wanted it to be a 400 episode series, and before the project was put on hold, it’s said he reportedly had 100 completed scripts. Turns out it was more around 50, but still.
During an interview with Collider, Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Outlander) opened up about his involvement with the series, which he was helping write at the time. He explained:
“I was one of several. there was a bunch of international writers they assembled… we would gather up at Skywalker Ranch once every six to eight weeks, something like that. And we would break stories together, and right after we’d go off and write some drafts and bring ‘em back, and George and we would sit down and critique them, and then do another draft and break more stories… It was great! It was a ball, it was a lot of fun. It didn’t happen ultimately, we wrote I’d say somewhere in the 40-something, 48 scripts, something like that… the theory was George wanted to write all the scripts and get ‘em all done and then he was gonna go off and figure out how to produce them, because he wanted to do a lot of cutting edge technological stuff with CG and virtual sets and so on. And so he had a whole new thing he wanted to accomplish. And what happened was, you know, we wrote the scripts and then George said ‘OK, this is enough for now, and then I’ll get back to you. I want to look into all the production things.’ And then time went by and like a year or something after that is when he sold Lucasfilm to Disney.”
Moore went on to talk about Lucas’ vision for the series describing it as “an extraordinary undertaking for someone to do.” He also said Lucas didn’t want them to have any constraints when writing the stories, saying:
“I don’t know anyone else that would really take that on… At the time, George just said ‘write them as big as you want, and we’ll figure it out later.’ So we really had no [budget] constraints. We were all experienced television and feature writers, so we all kind of knew what was theoretically possible on a production budget. But we just went, ‘For this pass, OK let’s just take him at his word just to make it crazy and big’ and there was lots of action, lots of sets, and huge set pieces. Just much bigger than what you would normally do in a television show.”
As far as the story, Moore said that the series would have connected into a single overarching storyline:
“Yeah, I think it was pretty much one big storyline. It was one long tale with episodic things that would happen. You know, there would be certain events [that] would happen in this episode or this episode, so it was sort of an episodic quality to some of it. But it was telling a larger narrative, in terms of the story of those particular characters in that setting.”
The series was to be set in the Coruscant underworld between Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope. It was going to be a gangster drama that was likened to Deadwood and The Godfather in space. It was also described as being The Empire Strikes Back on steroids. Lucasfilm producer Rick McCallum previously discussed the project, saying:
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 a group of underground bosses who live there and control drugs, prostitution.
There was also a rumor that the show would have involved time travel and killing Darth Vader. That report offered the following info:
One of the series' first episodes will involve a group of bandits acquiring the capability of time travel, and using it to travel back in time to stop Darth Vader from ever existing.
When previously talking about the project, after Disney bought Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy said:
“Interestingly enough, that's an area we’ve spent a lot of time, reading through the material that he developed is something we very much would like to explore. And there was 1313 the game, where there was…unbelievable. So our attitude is, we don’t want to throw any of that stuff away. It’s gold. And it’s something we’re spending a lot of time looking at, pouring through, discussing, and we may very well develop those things further. We definitely want to.”
While she says it’s gold, it’s a project that they obviously decided not to move forward with, which is a shame. This series could have been pretty damn cool! You can see some previously released test footage of the series below. As you can see, it would have had a very Blade Runner type vibe.