HELP ME RON D
IN PART TWO OF OUR LOOK AT WHAT THE ABORTIVE TV SERIES STAR WARS: UNDERWORLD MIGHT HAVE BEEN, WRITER RONALD D MOORE REVEALS WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO HELP GUIDE GEORGE LUCAS IN THE WAYS OF THE SMALL SCREEN
BY THE MID-2000S, writer and producer Ronald
D Moore was a major player in sci-fi television. He came up in the medium the oldschool way, steadily moving up the writing ladder of experience, eventually gaining the kind of critical cred that translates into creating and showrunning his own series.
His eight years on the Star Trek franchise, from The Next Generation through to Voyager, taught him the creative churn of script turnaround while honing his skills in the writers’ room and on the set. He then transitioned to executive-producing Roswell and Carnivàle, and rebooted Battlestar Galactica into a gritty modern classic. It’s not surprising, then, that Moore was on the radar of another sci-fi creator who was looking to put together a team to help him transition his popular space opera universe onto the small screen.
That guy was George Lucas, of course, who as we’ve already discussed was at that time exploring how the television medium might be a more conducive landscape for the kind of expanded, serialised and grittier storytelling he couldn’t do on the big screen with Star Wars. This would have been the Star Wars universe’s first live-action TV series, Star Wars: Underworld.
While Lucas and his producing partner Rick Mccallum had successfully created The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for ABC in 1992, for all intents and purposes that series operated more like a blockbuster film, with huge budgets and massive international filming. Expensive and unwieldy to produce for a US broadcast network, it was impossible to sustain for many seasons. Even a decade later, any live-action Star Wars television show would have to bend to the medium more.
What was needed was someone with the right sort of experience, who could help counsel one of the most innovative and successful filmmakers in history on how to tailor his big-screen creative process for the more fiscally conservative boundaries of TV. Someone like Ron Moore, who was sought out by Lucas and Mccallum because of their admiration for his work in genre TV.
Moore actually learnt of their interest via industry whisperings about Lucas seeking writers for a potential Star Wars TV project. As it turned out, Moore was on their list.
Though no details were provided, Moore still jumped at the chance to talk with Lucas about it. And as he’d already met Lucas back when he was working on Roswell (when he paid a visit to the set), he didn’t have a bad case of nerves.
“We met in LA at some office and had the first sit-down and chatted about the general parameters of the project,” Moore remembers. “George didn’t give me very much about the project itself in that meeting. We didn’t even talk about Star Wars to a great extent. I think he asked, ‘How well do you know it? And what do you think of it?’ And I talked a little bit
We talked a bit about how I got the Battlestar project and why I made some of the choices
about it. But most of the conversation was about science fiction in general.”
Lucas and Mccallum made it more of a personal interview about general sensibilities and Moore’s views on influential sci-fi. “We talked a bit about Battlestar and Star Trek,” he explains. “How I got the Battlestar project. Why I made some of the choices [for that show]. So it was kind of digging into me a little bit more.”
They gelled in that initial meeting, which led to a follow-up where Lucas was more forthcoming about his intentions for the show. “It was really interesting, because one of the first things he said was that he wanted to do something darker and more serialised,” Moore says. “It was more inspired by The Sopranos, which was the touchstone for what he was trying to do, rather than the big action adventure space opera that was Star Wars.
“It was definitely part of the same universe, but the context and the intention was very different.”
We were gonna try to do quite a radical departure from what had been done before
Moore says that was immediately exciting to him. “It was really fun to know it was a part of the Star Wars universe that hadn’t been touched. It was kinda cool not to have to engage with the larger mythology of the Rebel Alliance and the Empire and the Skywalker family. We were definitely doing something that was adjacent to it, and those elements were out there and would be referenced periodically, but that wasn’t the focus of the show. We were gonna try to do quite a radical departure from what had been done before.”
Once Moore expressed his interest to be part of it, Lucas revealed that he had already been talking to other writers from different countries: “That was the first inkling I had of the scope of what he was trying to do.”
Ultimately, Moore was one of the last to join what would be the Underworld writers’ room which assembled at the Skywalker Ranch in California. Because of Battlestar Galactica’s production needs, he missed the first few days.
“I don’t think I even knew who the other writers were before I got there,” Moore admits. “I was introduced to them when I arrived.”
All seven writers lived in the inn on the property and met in the main house at Skywalker Ranch. “We would troop up to the main house and meet in the conference room with George,” Moore details. “George would sit at the head of the table. We’d all sit around it, and there was a traditional writers’ room white dry-erase board.
“George had never worked in that format before, per se,” he explains about the dynamics of the room. “He was clearly the head of the room, but he didn’t have a fixed idea of where it was going. So it evolved organically.”
With Lucas used to generating Star Wars story ideas alone, to be scripted himself, Moore says that in the early days of the room he had to learn to translate what was already fleshed out in his head to the group. “He would realise that he had an idea but didn’t always share the whole framework,” Moore smiles.
As in other writers’ rooms, Lucas would field pitches from everyone, with some landing and some not. Moore says, “It took multiple
sessions of sitting and talking and just getting familiar with each other to get to a level of trust where George started to talk more and more about really what he wanted to do. We started to realise that he did have plans and ideas in his head that he was reticent to give at the beginning. And over the course of time and sessions, you started to realise his dream.”
THE DARK SIDE
Moore says that eventually they got a clear sense of the key players Lucas envisioned, along with the framework of the show. But the plot developed in the room. “The actual structure and pace and rhythm, that all grew organically as we all sat there.”
As they fleshed out the show more and more, the tone developed as promised by Lucas: dark. “I think it was definitely Sopranos-esque in terms of the ambiguity of the morality of the characters, and the darkness of the characters themselves and their moral compasses,” Moore says. “And it was about a crime family, so there were killings and murders.”
As to how many episodes would make up a season, Moore remembers that deciding on an actual count wasn’t a priority for Lucas. “He said right up front, ‘We’re gonna write a bunch of scripts. And we’re gonna write a lot more scripts than a typical season, and then I’m gonna produce them all. And then we’ll take them out to a network once they’re done’.”
That approach was completely foreign to the writers in the room. “We all went, ‘Whoa! Well, that is really different and very ambitious’,” Moore laughs. “And only George Lucas could even attempt to do something like that.”
As writing assignments formalised, Moore ended up writing two scripts featuring
It remains a very special time and is something that I was so thrilled to do
characters created purely for Star Wars: Underworld. “It was pretty much all our original characters. But in one of them, I did get to write some lines for Darth Vader, which was really fun. But he was the only legacy character that popped up.”
Despite all the scripts generated and the binders of concept work completed to realise its world, the series died when Disney bought Lucasfilm. Officially shelved, their work went into the archives.
“It remains a very special time and is something that I was so thrilled to do,” Moore says of the whole experience. “And it was a unique group of people that never really assembled again. Plus, seeing George Lucas every day, you knew you were just in a very special realm. I don’t know that it changed me as a writer, but it certainly changed me as a person.”
While the Disney+ series The Mandalorian has now taken the “first live action Star Wars” show mantle, Star Wars: Underworld might have done. Moore says that the thing in the Star Wars universe which most resembles what they intended to do is Rogue One.
“It’s probably the closest because it went darker, edgier, a little more ambiguous in terms of the characters than the rest of the movies that I’ve seen,” he concludes. “It felt like, ‘Yeah, that’s in the realm of what we were trying to accomplish’.”