Comics on the Web. If a producer's job is keeping an eye on the pocketbook, Star Wars impresario Rick McCallum has earned his money. Lensed on three continents and loaded with effects, skeptics contend the budget defies conventional logic. But there was nothing conventional about the way Phantom Menace was made, says McCallum, the epic's producer, who has worked in the trenches with Lucas to engineer a new type of filmmaking.
Time is fractured as real actors have their performances clipped from one take and added to another.
Like painting or writing, Lucas et al. comb through the original footage again and again, adding detail or paring away the superfluous. It's a model they invented in the past 10 years, beginning with the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles TV show and refined for features such as Radioland Murders and the refurbished 1997's Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition, on which McCallum came on board at Lucasfilm in 1995 to oversee the restoration as producer. A comparative literature major, he chucked academia for acting and kicked around Hollywood, working as an extra and performing stunts. He hooked up with writer Dennis Potter, who hired him to help rewrite a script for the 1981 Steve Martin comedy Pennies From Heaven, which he got to executive produce. When the film flopped, McCallum exiled himself to London.