Celebrated “Battlestar Galactica” and “Outlander” showrunner Ronald D. Moore is more synonymous with “Star Trek” than “Star Wars”. Moore’s early days was as a writer and producer on numerous Trek series, most notably on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”.
On a recent episode of Collider Connected though, Moore reflected on his career in television and spoke at length about his involvement in George Lucas’ unproduced live-action “Star Wars” television series that was at one time titled “Star Wars: Underworld”.
Lucas began developing the show back in 2004 after wrapping filming on the last of the prequels and he assembled several writers to work together to produce all the scripts for the entire series before any footage would be shot. Moore was one of the writers involved:
“I was one of several, there was a bunch of international writers they assembled… we would gather up at Skywalker Ranch once every six to eight weeks, something like that. And we would break stories together, and right after we’d go off and write some drafts and bring ‘em back, and George and we would sit down and critique them, and then do another draft and break more stories…
It was great! It was a ball, it was a lot of fun. It didn’t happen ultimately, we wrote I’d say somewhere in the 40-something, 48 scripts, something like that… the theory was George wanted to write all the scripts and get ‘em all done and then he was gonna go off and figure out how to produce them, because he wanted to do a lot of cutting edge technological stuff with CG and virtual sets and so on.
And so he had a whole new thing he wanted to accomplish. And what happened was, you know, we wrote the scripts and then George said ‘OK, this is enough for now, and then I’ll get back to you. I want to look into all the production things.’ And then time went by and like a year or something after that is when he sold Lucasfilm to Disney.”
TV shows usually only have a few scripts written before going into production, nothing close to the four dozen or so produced. Moore also says Lucas told them to “write them as big as you want, and we’ll figure it out later”. So the writers operated on the idea of having no [budget] constraints.
Moore also confirmed “it was pretty much one big storyline” though this long tale would have “episodic things that would happen”. For now, those scripts remain locked in the Lucasfilm vault.
