For a project that may or may not even happen, George Lucas and Rick McCallum certainly are spending an awful lot of time talking about their live-action Star Wars TV series. As was reported a couple of weeks ago, the show exists only as a stack of scripts featuring page after page of terse dialogues about trade regulation and the word “glower” used as stage direction (we’re assuming), and any plans to translate that story to screen will have to wait until the next great innovation in digital effects is available to distract from it. But in the meantime, McCallum spelled out a few more details of what you can expect from the show in an interview with Czech Position (via Bleeding Cool), who spoke to McCallum about the plans to shoot the show entirely within the Czech Republic, where all of the film crews operate with the sort of mechanical efficiency that was the hallmark of the Star Wars prequels.
Once again, McCallum confirmed that it would take place between Episodes III and IV—“when Luke Skywalker was growing up as a teenager, but it has nothing to do with Luke”—and would focus primarily on a different kind of dark side: “Basically, it is like The Godfather,” McCallum said. “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 [about] a group of underground bosses who live there and control drugs, prostitution.” Finally, those who spent most of Star Wars wondering how the galaxy got by with maybe only a handful of females will have their answer.
Anyway, as with the decade and change Lucas spent talking up the prequels, don’t expect to see it anytime soon: McCallum went Lucas’ wait-and-see approach one better by saying he didn’t think shooting would actually begin for another three or four years, and he doesn’t even sound entirely certain about that. “Network television and cable television as we know it are completely imploding,” McCallum said, “so we’re not really sure that in five years’ time we can release a dramatic one-hour episode because it is all reality TV now.” Did you notice the way McCallum subtly shifted from “three or four years” to “five,” then implicitly blamed the audience for the show’s delay? That’s some good manipulatin’. The student has become the master.