Mac and Me/Production

==Development==
Producer R. J. Louis had previously worked on advertising campaigns with McDonald's and had an association with their charitable arm Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC). He explained that at the time Ronald McDonald was "even more [well-known] than Santa Claus", but that E.T. was close behind and thus felt that the next "generation" needed an E.T. of their own. Louis was required to negotiate the rights to use the McDonald's brand and its elements within the film. He pitched the project as a cross-promotional endeavor which could be promoted at its restaurants, and with its profits helping to support RMHC.
Some have reported that the film was—at least partially—financed by McDonald's, which Louis denies. However, he did receive funding from Golden State Foods, a food service distributor closely associated with McDonald's; Louis had encountered its CEO in his efforts to pitch the film and was attracted by its charitable goals. Despite McDonald's specifying that they did not want Ronald McDonald to appear in the film, he nonetheless appeared in a scene set at a McDonald's restaurant which featured an extended dance sequence. The character also appeared in the theatrical trailer.
Louis noted that he was one of the first to leverage the chain as a platform for promoting films; Disney would later enter into a long-term deal with McDonald's to cross-promote properties including films through in-store campaigns such as Happy Meals, although this relationship ended in May 2006, amid pressure to reduce the promotion of junk food to children.
Despite this, Louis remarked that he was "still the only person in the universe that ever had the exclusive motion picture rights to the McDonald's trademark, their actors, their characters and the whole company."
==Stewart Raffill==
Stewart Raffill, who had made a number of family films, was brought on as director even before the film had a completed script. He says he was recommended to the producer by James Brolin, with whom Raffill had made 1981's High Risk.
Raffill later recalled:
I was hired out of the blue. And the producer asked me to come down to the office. So I did and he had a whole crew there, a whole crew on the payroll. It was amazing. He had the transportation captain. The camera department head. The AD. The Production Manager. He had everybody already hired and I said, "Well, what's the script?" And he said, "We don't have a script. I don't like the script. You have to write the script. You're gonna have to write it quickly so prep the movie and write the script on the weekends."
The crew aimed to distinguish the film from E.T. by having Mac be a member of a family and having powers and skills.
Raffill says the producer wanted to use an actor who was handicapped. "So he found a kid who had spina bifida. The kid had never acted before, but he was a wonderful kid. But when they finished it was as if the fact that they used a real encumbered person to play the person didn't mean anything to even the people who lived in the world." Raffill says "the moment Disney heard we had this deal with McDonald's, they went in and hammered out a three-year deal to get all their toys put in their Happy Meals and have that relationship with Coca-Cola. As such, the McDonald's people were then not particularly enthused with us as they now had Disney, but they had to fulfill their arrangement with us."
==Filming==
In one scene, Eric Cruise (played by Calegory, who has spina bifida and uses a wheelchair in real life) is seen rolling off a cliff in his wheelchair. Raffill noted that he performed a portion of the stunt himself, explaining that "it's very hard to do physical things when you're in that condition. It's very hard to make a wheelchair work because it's not a very balanced thing. When you start going fast in a wheelchair, you place tremendous risk on the child, so you have to try and figure out how to do that in a controlled fashion."
The shooting of Eric was explicitly shown in the Japanese VHS release of the film. For the film's mainstream release in theaters and on home video, this scene was cut from the test screening phase of the film following negative reactions from test audiences; the altered version made it so that Eric would die offscreen.
==Referneces==