In 1990, McCallum bet that the promise of only minor brain damage on "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" would net him major directors with minimal finger fucking. He ended up snagging a slew of them, including Bille August ("The Best Intentions") and Nicolas Roeg ("The Witches"). Some, like August, prepared for months; others flew onto the set and shot. Most fit into the series' young adult mode, although Roeg envisioned starting an episode about Mata Hari from inside her vagina -- a notion he withdrew when he discovered that Bertrand Blier had beat him to the view in "Femmes Fatales."

Get your "Star Wars" fix at BARNES & NOBLE

All were willing to forego perks and protocol. McCallum says that August thought nothing of flying coach to Stockholm on a Sunday because that was the only day Max von Sydow had off from the theater. McCallum also got August to enlist his then-wife Pernilla August (who plays the mother in "The Phantom Menace") for a one-day appearance at a $500 cash fee. And all were happy to have Lucas exploit digital technology that allowed him to create epic backdrops out of bits and pieces filmed in 27 countries during the four-year course of the series. At Skywalker Ranch last week, McCallum showed me a Young Indy reel demonstrating the tricks behind making Wilmington, N.C., look like New York City in the '20s, on the cheap. With computerized ease, a façade from Prague and an interior from Budapest merged into an entertainment palace on the Great White Way. Digital matte paintings turned a cardboard theater box into gilt and an unexceptional patch of Wilmington grass into Central Park. Sleight-of-keystroke multiplied eight dancers into chorus lines and purged one supporting player who had demanded high payment for extra shooting. This kind of prestidigitation -- taken further by the computer-generated dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park" (1993) and the computer-generated environments of "The Radioland Murders (1994) -- persuaded Lucas that he was ready to jump-start the "Star Wars" prequels.

McCallum transferred three concepts from "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" to "The Phantom Menace":

A) Deals were structured so that actors, technicians and crew remained available for new scenes and reshooting. The agreement McCallum struck is like the one Don Corleone makes with the undertaker at the start of "The Godfather": In return for the favor he does them (employing them on a potentially fun, exciting and lucrative project), he will one day exact a service of his own naming. Just one month before the opening of "The Phantom Menace," for example, McCallum and Lucas were back in London shooting Supreme Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) telling Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), "We will watch your career with great interest."

B) Costs could be limited through long-term planning, like leasing production facilities for the whole of a film's schedule. Most of "The Phantom Menace" was filmed in a huge old Rolls Royce warehouse outside London -- "a wonderful dump," McCallum says, now known as Leavesden Studios -- which he kept ready for the film's possible return until Lucas said "Cut!" for the last time.

C) "George could direct from the editing room." Satellite transmissions and digital technology enabled Lucas to see footage from all over the world, readjust sequences to his liking and delegate authority from the cutting room -- though he did fly back to London to add that scene with Palpatine. Lucas' use of "animatics" -- defined by Lucasfilm as "low-resolution moving graphics," but also including stock footage, pickup shots and so on -- is precisely like a cartoonist's use of animated storyboards to create a rough cut before the start of principal production. But Lucas collaborates so closely with his "previsualizers" that he set them up not at ILM but at Lucasfilm and turned to them for "postvisualizing" too -- including the computer alteration of an actor so that Anakin glances in the direction of Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) instead of looking straight ahead.

It's the efficiency as much as the innovation of Lucas' empire that McCallum hopes will make it a role model. He feels that Lucasfilm will be easy for small-scale indie filmmakers to emulate when it becomes routine to record and deliver pictures into theaters digitally, without ever committing them to film. Eliminating Hollywood's inflated overhead, hiring fewer craftsmen for longer periods and teaching them computer skills (something that already has jolted the art of film editing) sounds like a healthy treatment for an ailing industry.

Still, the proof must lie in the product. When asked whether actors go stale when forced to rely on animatics for context, McCallum says that "trained performers treat it like dress rehearsal in a theater." With the exception of Pernilla August, the bland ensemble in "The Phantom Menace" suggests otherwise. When McCallum says that computers enable writer-directors to realize their conceptions without compromise, you wonder whether employing another writer or a dialogue director might have improved Episode One exponentially. And when he says movies are now "more of a painterly than a photographic medium," you wish that wouldn't mean "cartoon." Lucasfilm has done a lot for moviemaking, but at the end of its latest production, one question remains: "Will the Force be used for good?"
salon.com | May 20, 1999

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