Rick McCallum

• 1. Introduction

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  Near the end of The Phantom Menace, Palpatine arrives on Naboo, and in that scene the film's producer, Rick McCallum, makes a brief cameo. It is a small in-joke, but it hints at a larger oddity. Richard McCallum was born on the 22nd of August 1954. His name is attached to a landmark of British television, a globe-trotting adventure series, and a trilogy that pushed cinema toward digital production. What links those very different worlds? How does a producer of British television drama end up running the Star Wars prequels? And what does a producer actually do when a director's ambitions outrun the tools of the day?

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• 2. Pennies and Potter

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  Pennies from Heaven, released in 1981, was the first film Rick McCallum produced. It adapted a 1978 BBC television drama, with Herbert Ross directing and Dennis Potter writing. The film did not succeed commercially. Potter answered the failure by inviting McCallum to come and work in England, and that offer shaped the rest of the decade.

  Dreamchild followed in 1985. Potter used it for an unusual look at how Alice's Adventures in Wonderland came to be written, and the film earned two BAFTA nominations. McCallum also produced Track 29, directed by Nicolas Roeg, and served as executive producer on The Singing Detective, a BBC series now regarded as a landmark. In 1989 he produced Blackeyes, a television series that Potter directed himself.

  It was on the set of Dreamchild that McCallum first met George Lucas, and the meeting would matter more than anyone there could have known.

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• 3. A Restless Slate

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  Away from Potter, McCallum spent the 1980s moving between very different filmmakers. David Hare's Strapless and Neil Simon's I Ought to Be in Pictures both carried his name as producer. Harvey Fierstein's Tidy Endings, made for HBO, won two CableACE Awards. McCallum also produced Castaway, another film from Nicolas Roeg. The decade's last credit on this list was a music video, the Rolling Stones' "Undercover of the Night", directed by Julien Temple.

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• 4. Thirty-Five Countries

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  Several years after the Dreamchild set, Lucas was preparing his first weekly live-action television program and turned to McCallum. The show was The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and it was planned for shooting in 35 countries. The pitch rested on the cinematic quality of Indiana Jones's early life, a focus on storytelling and characters, and the promise of a new adventure every week. McCallum used that pitch to draw writers and actors into the project.

  The list of directors he worked with on the series was long and varied. It included Bille August, Nicolas Roeg, David Hare, Mike Newell, Deepa Mehta, Terry Jones, Gavin Millar, Simon Wincer and Carl Schultz. During the run, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded the series 12 Emmy Awards from 26 nominations.

  When the series reached DVD in 2007, McCallum joined Lucas as a joint executive producer of 94 accompanying documentaries. Those films explain the real history behind the stories in each episode.

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• 5. The Digital Frontier

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  Radioland Murders, released in 1994, was the first film McCallum produced once Young Indiana Jones had ended. Lucas served as its executive producer and originated the story. During that production, Lucas confided to McCallum that he planned three new Star Wars movies.

  Before those could be made, the new digital technology needed testing. Part of it grew out of work done on Young Indiana Jones. McCallum produced revised versions of A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, which reached audiences in 1997 as the Special Editions.

  The prequels came next, all written and directed by Lucas. McCallum produced The Phantom Menace in 1999, Attack of the Clones in 2002 and Revenge of the Sith in 2005. He assembled the teams working in front of and behind the cameras. He also oversaw the creative and technical professionals who built the industry's first all-digital production pipeline.

  Seven years after Revenge of the Sith, another film backed by Lucas reached American cinemas.

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• 6. Red Tails and Retirement

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  On the 20th of January 2012, Red Tails opened nationally in the United States. McCallum was one of its producers, and Lucas was its executive producer. The action-adventure film pays tribute to the spirit of the Tuskegee Airmen of the Second World War.

  Later that year, Disney announced its acquisition of Lucasfilm. Steve Sansweet of Lucasfilm told the ForceCast.net podcast, "Rick has retired from Lucasfilm". McCallum had been involved in a possible live-action series set in the Star Wars universe. That show had been put on hold in 2010 because of budget concerns.

  Having left Lucasfilm, McCallum chose a new home in a different country.

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• 7. Prague Projects

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  McCallum settled in Prague, in Czechia, and founded a company there called Film United. The company develops film projects and provides production services for Czech and European feature films.

  R'ha is a science fiction feature based on an earlier short film. Kaleb Lechowski directed it, and Matthew Graham wrote it. In the Fog is a Second World War film by the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa. So Far So Good, known in Czech as Zatim dobry, is based on Jan Novak's novel about the Masin brothers.

  McCallum also served as executive producer of A Long Way Home, which Paki Smith directed from a script by Alex Rose.

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• 8. Family Ties

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  Film already ran through McCallum's family before his own career began. His mother, the photographer Pat York, is married to the actor Michael York. His father, Roy Alwood McCallum, was a United States military pilot.

  His daughter, Olivia, known as Mousy, also works in the film industry, so the family's link to cinema continues into another generation.

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