GOING UNDERGROUND
BACK IN 2005, GEORGE LUCAS ANNOUNCED STAR WARS’ FIRST LIVE-ACTION TV SERIES. BUT DESPITE SEVEN YEARS OF WORK, STAR WARS: UNDERWORLD NEVER MATERIALISED. MATTHEW GRAHAM, ONE OF ITS WRITERS, TALKS ABOUT HIS TIME WORKING ON THE SERIES WE NEVER GOT TO SEE
FOR MATTHEW GRAHAM, the phone call he’d dreamed of since he was a nine-year-old Star Wars fan arrived in the incongruous setting of a field outside Frome. It was from his agent.
“Are you sitting down?”
“No,” Graham replied. “I’m in a field.”
“Just sit down in the grass then,” said the voice, “because I’m about to tell you that you’re being considered for Star Wars!”
“It’s that thing you dream of, isn’t it?” Graham enthuses now, recalling that careerquake call. “It’s the ultimate daydream!”
The Star Wars that Graham – then flying high on the success of Life On Mars, the genre-splicing series he’d co-created with Tony Jordan and Ashley Pharoah – was being invited onto was a super-hush-hush TV project that Lucas had announced, to ear-splitting applause, two years previously at Celebration III. Rick Mccallum, Lucas’s loyal deputy at the time, would later confirm that the series was to be called Star Wars: Underworld and would be like “Empire on steroids”.
Where the Star Wars movies had told simple stories of clean-cut heroes fighting the good fight, Underworld would instead, it was intimated, echo the dark, morally ambiguous worlds of The Sopranos and The Wire. It would have been Star Wars’ first live-action TV series and, as it was planned, one of the most expensive shows – if not the most expensive show – ever seen on the small screen. For seven years, Lucas and Mccallum teased and titillated us with nuggets of news: It would be set in the 19 years between Revenge Of The Sith and A New Hope; it was being budgeted at around $5 million an episode; it would in no way feature heritage characters; it would feature heritage characters; it was “Deadwood in space”... And so on. Then, on 30 October 2012, Disney bought Lucasfilm for an eyewatering $4.05 billion and amid the media noise of the sequel trilogy, Underworld was quietly forgotten about. When Star Wars’ first live-action TV show finally dropped in 2019, it wouldn’t be Underworld, though much of what we’ve seen in Jon Favreau’s bounty hunter show owes a debt to that lost series.
“I don’t think we were a million miles away from The Mandalorian,” Matthew Graham tells SFX. “It was pretty dark: we had rape, we had drug-taking and drug abuse, we had beheadings. It was definitely not your grandfather’s Star Wars – it wasn’t cert U.”
Let’s rewind back to 2007, to the time that Underworld entered Matthew Graham’s life. It was a few weeks after that Somerset field phone call that Graham found himself on a train to London to hook up with Lucasfilm’s Rick Mccallum for a getting-to-know-you power lunch.
“I really liked him,” the writer says of the prequel trilogy’s charismatic producer. “He’s a tremendous larger-than-life character, a real raconteur, at the time a real chain-smoking, cheeseburger-munching, wine-at-lunchtime bon viveur.”
In many ways, the complete opposite of his boss, then. When Graham finally sat down, a few months later, with the notoriously shy George Lucas it was in a “really downmarket”
London hotel that Lucasfilm had hired to interview a host of writers that Mccallum had been sourcing from around the country. As Graham was waiting anxiously by the lift, a writer he recognised stepped out, ashen-faced. “I was like, ‘Oh fucking hell, maybe this is going to be really scary!’” he laughs.
Blessedly, it wasn’t. Graham had just been reading JW Rinzler’s definitive coffee table tome The Making Of Star Wars and, when he sat down in front of Lucas, launched straight into a question about greenscreen versus back projection. As he was nattering away, Graham glanced over Lucas’s shoulder and saw Mccallum giving an encouraging thumbs up gesture. It was working.
Half an hour later, as Graham left the room Mccallum told him, “You did really well, George obviously felt very comfortable with you,” admitting that some of the other writers
George is a very shy person and he takes a while to warm up and get used to people
had clammed up. “They were so overwhelmed being with George,” he told him. “The problem is George will never be the one to break the ice – if you seize up, he’ll seize up.”
“George is a very shy person and he takes a while to warm up and get used to being with people that he doesn’t know,” says Graham. “He’s wary of people – not in a nasty way, but I think he worries that people would want something from him.”
HOME ON THE RANCH
Within a few months Graham found himself on a plane to the US and to Skywalker Ranch, alongside fellow Brit Chris Chibnall. Also en route were a US writer named John Steinberg (who’d go on to create the Starz show Black Sails) and three Australians: Tony Mcnamara (recently behind Netflix show The Great), Louise Fox (Glitch) and Jacqueline Perske. “The Australian writers didn’t really know Star Wars at all,” reveals Graham. “Unlike us, they weren’t Star Wars nuts, they’d only really watched the films in preparation for coming out to Skywalker Ranch.”
When this motley band of writers arrived at the palatial Marin County hacienda, there were no scripts but Lucas had been working furiously on the “world-building”, according to Graham.
“There’s probably only so much I can tell you about the specifics,” Graham cautions, “but what I can tell you is that it was predominantly set on Coruscant and that George had come up with these crime families who lived in the lower levels of the planet.”
The show would, he says, have started in the aftermath of Order 66, the instruction from Palpatine in Revenge Of The Sith ordering the execution of all Jedi. “Lucas said if the Star Wars movies were World War Two told through the eyes of all the generals and the captains and the world leaders, he wanted this show to be told through the eyes of the criminals and the lower classes. To be honest, initially there wasn’t a lot of [the] Empire in it – it was mostly stories within the world of the criminals,” he adds.
Later on, the group was joined by Ronald D Moore, the former Star Trek scribe bringing with him some of the political grit that he’d introduced to his Battlestar Galactica reboot a few years previously. “George really liked that,” Graham says. “After that, we created some Imperial characters that became protagonists, because we decided that not everyone in the Empire was evil. I mean, not everyone spends their time hanging around with Darth Vader. Most people just got on with the administrative business of running an empire.”
There was also a character that Graham and Chibnall created who worked as a detective. “He was such an interesting character that Chris and I worked on an idea that we pitched to George called Imperial Crime Lab, which was basically Star Wars meets CSI,” he beams. “That would have been awesome!”
Among the writers, there were broadly two camps. In the fanboy team there was Graham, plus Ron Moore, John Steinberg and Chris
It was about finding a path between making it Star Wars but not just fanboy service
Chibnall, and in the other, the less mythologically in-thrall Aussie scribes. “They didn’t want to come up with the names for anything,” Graham laughs. “I remember Tony Mcnamara having a Corellian bar, and literally in the script it said they were drinking cappuccinos and eating lasagne! I got really upset about this and Tony said, ‘Well, I don’t fucking know what they’re eating – fucking boo-boo juice!’
“But George was absolutely great,” Graham continues. He said, ‘I know what you’re saying. Say lasagne, that’s fine, we know what you mean – I’ll come up with a word for it later.’ What was very interesting though was the Australian writers took it to places that were non-fanboy and therefore tended to be more dramatically interesting. We realised it was about finding a path between making it Star Wars but not making it just fanboy service, because it had to stand on its own as a real piece of drama.”
A MEATY ROLE
Early whispers indicated that Underworld was going to resist using already established Star Wars characters, but, as Graham notes, “George has very, very strong opinions that he will not budge on… until he budges on them.” Graham won’t be drawn on which classic characters Lucas was planning on weaving into the series, but internet scuttlebutt hints that
Boba Fett was in line for a meaty role, and that Darth Vader was going to lend his dark charisma to the show after an uprising on Coruscant. There was even talk that the series would have explored Han Solo’s origins – a story eventually told, of course, in Ron Howard’s Solo.
While Lucas was working with Graham and co on the scripts, he was also developing the show’s eye-wowing visuals. Graham vividly recalls the day when Industrial Light & Magic’s John Knoll screened the writing team the tests that his people were doing, creating the digital sets for George’s dream project. “Everything looked way more photorealistic than the
prequels, so much so that you actually couldn’t tell that you weren’t moving through a real space,” he says excitedly. “They’d actually managed to take some of the old sets from the original trilogy and create these virtual 3D environments. What it did was it allowed you, in theory, according to George, to tell very epic, expensive episodes on a TV budget.”
The Rebel Alliance of Underworld writers would convene at Skywalker Ranch every few months, for two weeks at a time, to brainstorm ideas and beaver away on scripts. Yet it wasn’t all hard graft. Graham smiles as he remembers one afternoon when, after Mccallum left the meeting room, George looked around the table
They’d managed to take some of the old sets and create these 3D environments
and said, with a mischievous glint in his eye, “Well, the producer’s gone, which means us writers don’t have to do any work. Let’s go to the screening room!”
The writers would then file across to Lucas’s state-of-the-art cinema, where their boss would screen them 35mm prints of Willow and American Graffiti, while providing a live director’s commentary. “He loved to do things like that, he really did,” beams Graham.
In all, 50 scripts were written for Underworld. Lucasfilm’s art department had been busy designing its worlds and Graham believes there’d even been some preliminary casting. Towards the end of his time on the series, Graham was jetting out to the show’s Sydney production base to work on the scripts, making sure they all “matched up”.
Just as Graham remembers the call that kickstarted his Star Wars life, he remembers the phone call that ended it: “It was from Rick to say he had some disappointing news,” he recalls. “He said, ‘George has just announced that he’s selling Lucasfilm to Disney. We don’t know what’s going to happen – the scripts may be mothballed, or who knows what.’”
Disney eventually decided to close the door on Underworld, and, over eight years on from that surprise announcement, it seems that Lucas really has retired for good. Graham says the news came as a shock to pretty much everyone in Lucasfilm. No-one (not even his deputy it seems) saw it coming, and Graham is as mystified as anybody else as to Lucas’s reasons for shutting up shop so abruptly. Surely, after so much hard graft, working for his hero on the job of his childhood dreams, he was crushed by the news that Underworld was no more? Amazingly not, it seems.
“When I was a kid I saw Star Wars,” he says, “and when I was a little bit older I started writing Star Wars stories, and then I was forty-something and I was working on Star Wars with George Lucas! I’d sort of won the game. If it’d been made, it would have been amazing but I didn’t need it to be made.
I’d done it, you know?”