Going Rogue I: The Pitch

George was working on something new, something that after the much maligned prequels would

“take Star Wars back to its roots, back to the time of rebels and the empire and hides”

of scum and villainy. George Lucas was making a live-action Star Wars TV show. The news reached visual effects supervisor John Null, who was on set in Sydney at the time. Null wasn't a writer, he was a visual effects pioneer who, among other things, invented Photoshop with his brother.

He'd been working at Lucasfilm's Inhouse VFX company Industrial Light and Magic, or ILM since 1986, but he'd actually been around the studio much longer.

Here he is in a Lucasfilm DVD special feature, talking about the first time he visited

the ILM. My dad had a conference in Anaheim, and he brought my brothers and I along, so my first trip to California.

“And I had read this amazing article in the Sydney Fantastic Magazine.”

They had fairly substantial interviews with a lot of the folks that had worked on New Hope at ILM. And there I was in the hotel room in Anaheim, and I picked up a phone book and just on a large look to see if there was a listing for industrial light magic in their lives. So I called up, and I said, "I'm a model maker," and I'm interested in working in the

industry.

This is a wanted to come on down and we'll show you around.

So the next morning, my dad drove me to Van Eyes where I lamb was, dropped me off. I spent the entire day at ILM, and I saw them building models in the model shop for the next episode. That was a pretty transformative experience.

“John Null has big uncle energy, a little nerdy, a little softly spoken, but really switched”

on an enthusiastic. Guillermo del Toro once described him as having the heart of a kid and the mind of a scientist. And when he heard about the Star Wars TV show, Null couldn't help having an idea for an episode that went back to the very beginning.

Literally, it came from the opening crawl of a new hope.

Null started thinking about a mission impossible style break-in into the most secure facility in the Empire to steal the Death Star plans, figuring that it could make a good hour of TV. A couple of days later, Null ran into Rick McCallum, the producer of the Star Wars prequels and producer of the TV show, and asked what exactly was happening with his show that they were developing.

So McCallum told Null about Star Wars underworld, a gritty crime drama set on the lower levels of Coruscant between episodes three and four. Realizing that his mission impossible pitch was the wrong time period in setting for the show, Null put the idea away, and eventually Lucasfilm would also have to put underworld away. The idea of a Death Star plan-high stuck with Null, and 13 years later, Lucasfilm would

release Rogue One, a Star Wars story, with Null as executive producer, visual effects supervisor, and one of the writers. This is going rogue, the story of Rogue One. But it's also the story of Lucasfilm and Disney, and a film industry run rampant on franchises, and a fan culture at war with itself.

It's about capitalism and idealism, artists and executives, filmmaking, and what makes the Star Wars movie Star Wars. Over the next six episodes, we're going to cover the origins, writing, pre-production shoot, post-production, and research, and release of Rogue One in, frankly, too much detail, to try and answer one question.

Why is Rogue One like that? Regardless of how you feel about the movie, and I have mixed feelings, there is no denying that it is unlike any other Star Wars film, and although all of the Disney Star Wars films have been affected in some way by a lot of the cultural and economic forces we're going to cover, to me, Rogue One is the most interesting encapsulation of them,

because it was genuinely trying to do something completely new for Star Wars, and its success or failure to do so, it says as much about the film industry, and culture at large, as it does, about the complicated and difficult production of the film itself. I'm your host, Tansy Gotham, I'm a film critic and writer, and I have been fascinated by Rogue One since, before it came out really, before we go back to 2003, a few housekeeping

things. One, this is not a gossip or character assassination podcast, and I want to say right

research, but this does lead me to my second disclosure, which is that from 2013 to 2017,

“which was the entire time that Rogue One was in production, I was employed by Disney,”

on a very low pay grade, and on the other side of the world to anyone or anything involved with Rogue One. My old job has very little to do with this podcast, and I am going to really clearly flag the couple of times it does, but I also want to acknowledge it upfront. The last thing I need to say is that throughout this series, I am going to be referring

to the first Star Wars film released in 1977 as episode 4, or a new hope. I know that wasn't its release title, I know it was called Star Wars, it's for clarity, please don't add me. Alright, everything covered? Let's get back to Star Wars Underworld.

According to George Lucas, Underworld would have changed television. If it had been made, it was by all accounts that showed that a lot of people wanted the prequels to be.

“Producer Rick McCallum described it as deadwood in space.”

Set deep beneath the surface of Coruscant, on level 13, 13, the show would have focused on bounty hunters and one sprawling crime family, with occasional appearances from existing characters like Vader and Palpatine, but more of a focus on the new characters. Much like the films, it would have been produced by Lucasfilm and then sold to a television network for distribution, rather than the channel funding it from the ground up, allowing

George to maintain creative control. George hired a bunch of writers to work on the show, including Ronald D. Moore, the man behind the 2004 Battle Star Galactic A reboot. Matthew Graham, creator of BBC's Life On Mars and Ashes to Ashes, Chris Chibnell, who would later create broad church and head up Doctor Who, and Tony McNamara, who would go on

to write the favorite and the great. The writers were in spent months outlining and writing 50, 1 hour long episodes.

“There was a two-part-aware Darth Vader let a crackdown on a Coruscant uprising, and Propelpatine”

was given the first name sheave, and had his heart broken by a hardcore gangster woman. Boba Fett was the most prominent returning character, and Daniel Logan was really keen to reprise his role from the prequels. But the writers also had a really rare chance to build out the world of Star Wars, away from the Jedi and the Skywalker's who'd anchored the films.

They created the Pike Crimes Syndicate, and the Church of the Force, and an underground pod racing scene. As well as building a darker world, the show looked at some of the darker elements that were established in the prequels, like the clones who were aging rapidly after being decommissioned, and who were left to drift and gathered in Bar 79 to drink away the memories of what they

had done during Order 66. Above all, the writers were told by George Lucas to, quote, "think big. Don't have any worries. We'll make it. Budget is no object." Budget it turned out was an object, because budget is what stopped underworld from happening. In 2010, after many delays, Lucas was asked by IGN if we'd ever actually see the series to which he said.

Well, right now we don't know. We have Booby the Week in 50 hours, written, all done, ready

to go. It's just that we can't figure out a way of doing it for less than $50 million

on episode, and obviously we can't afford to do that. So, I'm not going to compromise on the quality of it, so we just have to keep working on the technology to see if we can improve ways of getting the story told without a costume unfortunately. In other interviews, George Lucas suggested that once they actually cracked the question of how to make underworld on a TV budget, it would have a knock on effect to the rest of film

and TV, making everything cheaper, and meaning you could make a 10-pole Star Wars film for $50 million instead of 200. Even with hypothetical changes in technology, underworld was still going to cost between 11 and $20 million in episode, and that's in 2005 money. For comparison, the 2004 pilot for lost cost $12 million, and that went for two hours.

At best, underworld would have had about $5-6 million per episode to play with.

There was some test done to work out how exactly you would be able to make a big budget show on a small budget, and in 2009, Lucas apparently contacted British director and VFX artist Garith Edwards about working on underworld, after seeing a TV special on a tiller the hunt that Edwoods had directed, that used a lot of strategic VFX to make it look like it cost about £10 million on a £1.5 million budget.

George Lucas and Rick McCallum even discussed making another Star Wars film just to fund the series. After all, they had all the resources of Lucasfilm at their disposal. Video game-arm Lucasites were already working on a companion game. Star Wars 13-13.

are very deeply into chronicling every scrap of information about it, and every few

“months, there's a new video of it. 13-13 is really not my area of expertise. The last”

Star Wars game I played was episode one, Port Racer, but the glimpses of gameplay footage that have leaked over the years look pretty good. While 13-13 was premiered at E3 in 2012 to massive interest in a claim. Underworld stalled, its 50 scripts were locked in a Lucasfilm vault, waiting for their day in the sun. Except the longer they sat there, the more George cannibalized them, taking concept art, arcs and entire characters from underworld, and repurposing

them for the Clone Wars. The Star Wars TV show that actually got made. The Clone Wars was an animated show that ran from 2008 to, well that's complicated, but it was made with a much more modest budget of around $2 million in episode, and frankly, it shows. The animation is, air quotes stylized with a Thunderbirds aesthetic that just looks really cheap, especially

“in early seasons. The Clone Wars was arguably the last Star Wars property that George Lucas”

had really hands on involvement with. And even then, a lot of that was mediated through his protegeate Dave Filoni, who ran the show and had come to Lucasfilm after directing a lot of the first season of Avatar The Last Airbender. Early arcs of Clone Wars are very much kids TV, and while it definitely got darker and more ambitious in later years, even stealing entire story lines

from underworld, it was never the show that underworld wanted to be. It focused on the Jedi and

had a much more prequel, bright and colorful, and plastic aesthetic than the Blade Runner Coruscant of the underworld concept art. One of the characters recycled from underworld was violent rebel guerrilla fighter Saw Guerrera. Saw's violence was obviously toned down for the PG Saturday morning cartoon, but he still explicitly toes the line between freedom fighter and terrorist, blowing up

“city generators and decapitating battle droids. Unfortunately, Saw also spends most of his”

Clone Wars screen time playing for fiddle to an unconvincing love triangle, which, in true Star Wars tradition, has a weird reveal that one of the people who seems like a love interest is actually his sister. The amount George Lucas took from underworld for Clone Wars was a bit disheartening to the artist who'd been working on underworld. One of whom said it felt like they were building up a show and the bricks were being taken out from under them. But that was the nature of the game.

They were developing a show for Lucasfilm, which meant they were making a show for George Lucas, the company's one and only shareholder, and it's one and only creative lead. To put it bluntly, Star Wars belonged to George, and he could do whatever the hell he wanted. It's a fun and often quoted bit of Star Wars trivia that George Lucas got the rights to the name Star Wars, as well as all merchandising and sequel rights, because Fox didn't think those

rights had any value back in the 70s, calling them the garbage in the contract. It's also not really true. There were about two years worth of negotiating on these rights, and Fox did kind of have equal rights to sell movie-related products. What they didn't have was the name Star Wars, which had gone exclusively to Lucasfilm. At the time, this probably didn't seem like such a big deal, because the film's title wasn't Star Wars. It was the adventures of the Star Killer episode one,

the Star Wars, and the script made it clear that the second film, if there was one, would be called

the adventures of the Star Killer episode two, the Princess of Undos. Lucasfilm had the exclusive rights to the film's subtitle, not the actual series. Lucasfilm also had to start work on a sequel within two years of the first film's release to hold onto sequel rights. With those sequel and merchandising rights, George Lucas built an empire. He was able to fund the empire strikes back, and all subsequent Star Wars films independently, holding onto the rights and maintaining complete

creative control for better or for worse. Lucas had had some bad experiences with studios on his first two films. THX1138, an American graffiti, where Lucas felt that the studio executives had cut minutes from the film not for any real reason, just to show that they could. And the success

of Star Wars meant that George Lucas would never be at the mercy of studio executives again.

Star Wars is also an oddity in the film franchise world because it's kind of the closest thing we have to a pure film franchise. There is no source material, no books like Harry Potter or James Bond, no comics like Marvel or DC, no TV show like Mission Impossible, not even a ride like Pirates of the Caribbean. Sure Star Wars ended up with books and TV shows and comics and games, but all of that came from the films, and the films were always filtered through the mind of George Lucas. The only

the Fast and the Furious, which was initially based on an article in Viper Magazine and only

“really became a cohesive franchise in later films, and the Matrix, which, while coming originally”

from the minds of the Wichowski's "Ezoneed by Warner Bros." As Lana Wichowski made painfully clear in the Matrix resurrections. Things have changed, the market's tough. I'm sure you can understand why our beloved parent company Warner Bros. has decided to make a sequel to the trilogy. One? They informed me they're going to do it with it without us. I thought they couldn't do that. Oh, they can.

In the age of franchise filmmaking that he kicked off, George Lucas was basically the only filmmaker

who truly owned the franchise he made and the company around it. Lucasfilm is best known for Star Wars, but the company is actually made up of a bunch of subsidiaries that keep money coming in when their art Star Wars films are merged to sell. There's visual effects on Industrial Light and Magic,

“which started out as a warehouse for the Stoner's Invan knives and has lived on the cutting edge”

of digital effects ever since. There's also Skywalker Sound, which is the industry standard for post-production sound mixing and folly. They've probably worked on 90% of the movies you've watched. Skywalker Sound is less well known to the general public than ILM, because while visual effects are big and flashy and eye-catching, good sound mixing is invisible. Most people only notice sound mixing when it's bad. There are also arms of Lucasfilm that were beloved, but

"blad money," like video game company LucasArts. Star Wars was always the big ticket item, but Lucasfilm made money well beyond just film production. The six Star Wars films Lucas made had earned around $4.3 billion at the box office, but Lucasfilm had made around $30 billion in the same time period. But even with all of the resources of Lucasfilm, George Lucas still

“struggled to make the movies he wanted to make. Ever since the 80s he'd been saying he was”

going to step away from Star Wars and focus on smaller, experimental personal projects like his

first two films. But he never quite did it. In 2011 he'd finally gotten around to making red

tails, a movie about the Tuskegee Airman that he'd been thinking about since the 80s, but the film was a real uphill battle. Lucas had to cover the film's $60 million budget himself, and find another $35 million for distribution costs when he couldn't find a major studio willing to distribute and advertise the film properly, which Lucas insisted was because it had an all black cast. Lucas couldn't even get Star Wars underworld off the ground, and that was a Star

Wars TV show. By this time, George Lucas was in his 60s, and after 30 years of making Star Wars, he was starting to think about where Lucasfilm would go next. Possibly without the Lucas, and even more importantly, he'd fallen in love. George Lucas's first wife, Marsha, was one of the Oscar-winning editors on the first Star Wars film. We're going to talk more about her work in a later episode, but by return at the Jedi,

she was on our way out. The 1983 divorce was messy, and thanks to California Law,

there was an equal division of assets and a $50 million settlement.

One of the Lucasfilm departments that George lost in the post-divours fire sale was the graphics group, which was spun off into an independent company and bought by Steve Jobs, under the new name, Pixar. For more than 20 years, George Lucas had the most divorced dad energy in Hollywood. He and Marsha had adopted a daughter when they were married, and George adopted two more children as a single parent. All three kids have cameos in the prequels, and Lucas's youngest daughter

Katie worked with him at Lucasfilm, writing 15 episodes of The Clone Wars. But in 2005, George met Melody Hobson, President of Ariel Investments, and the then chairwoman of DreamWorks Animation. She was a black Princeton grad from Chicago. George was a white USC kid from small town, California. By 2008, Melody was being introduced to the Lucasfilm team, and declaring it bring your girlfriend to work day. And suddenly, George Lucas had a lot more to think about than just

his company. George and Melody had been together for five years, when Disney CEO Bob Iger first asked George if he would consider selling Lucasfilm to Disney. Disney have their own corporate history, so complicated and convoluted that to even try and summarize it does a disservice to how buck wild it was. But in very broad strokes, Bob Iger was installed as CEO in 2005 after a

Michael Eisner. Eisner had been Disney CEO for 21 years, and led the company through its

“Renaissance in the 90s. But by the mid 2000s, he was making a habit of big, expensive, and”

questionable decisions. Like Euro Disney, and buying the ABC network. Before the revolt, Eisner had actually been lining Bob Iger up as his latest protege, which given that Eisner liked to promote his close friends and then ruin their lives, feels like Iger kind of dodged a bullet there. Shortly after he became CEO, Bob Iger made to very big, very interesting purchases. He bought

Pixar for $7 billion in 2006, and then he bought Marvel Studios for $4 billion in 2009.

Bob Iger's big investments were all about intellectual property. He was buying companies, but with them came stories, characters, and worlds. Pixar was incredibly valuable, not just as a film studio, but as the creator of merchandise of all characters. The first cars film sold $10 billion worth of merch in the five years after its release, which was more

“than every Pixar film's box office up until that point combined. That's not to say that Pixar”

films weren't of interest to Disney, they were also vital. Once of by-word for animation, Disney was going through a slump in its animated films, starting with an experimental period in the early 2000s, that produced some now beloved films like Treasure Planet and The Emperors New Grove, that were absolute box office poison. This slump really wouldn't be lifted until 2010's Tangled, which was executive produced by Pixar's John Lassadar, as part of a new slate of

Walt Disney Animation films underlacid as creative leadership, as part of a partnership with Pixar. The Marvel purchase was a pretty similar deal to Pixar. Disney got to release a few movies, and a lot of merch, and one of the things that Disney really focused on was the 15,000 characters that the deal gave them ownership of. That was kinda to make up for the lack of big names that Disney got in the deal. Spider-Man, The X-Men, and The Fantastic Four had already been

sold to other studios. But Marvel Studios had just released Iron Man, their first successful Homeroom movie that proved that the company could build Marvel's B-Roster into its new 18. There was another reason that Bo-Aga was seeking out characters in IP. Disney missed out on two of the biggest franchises of the 2000s. Harry Potter and Lotta The Rings. Lotta The Rings was a particular saw point because it had actually been developed with Disney's money. Back in the

late 90s, Harvey Weinstein, Yuck, whose company Miramax was owned by Disney, had put $14 million

into the development of Lotta The Rings. Back when Peter Jackson was just a moderately successful indie director from New Zealand. Weinstein needed Michael Eisner's approval for the projected $180 million budget. Which he didn't get because Eisner was convinced that the films would fail. Peter Jackson ended up taking the project to New Line Cinema. He made three beloved films, grossed a few billion dollars in 1 or 11 Oscars. Only to go full George Lucas and make three

ill-advised and poorly-prepared prequels that relate to much on CGI and lost him most of his goodwill among fans. The other big franchise of the decade was Harry Potter, which produced a David Hamon, who had pitched straight to Warner Brothers because he had an existing relationship with them, freezing out Disney. Warner Brothers would go on to make eight films that defined a decade and many childhoods and later make three ill-advised prequels that relied too much on CGI.

But that's the deal from I guess perspective. From George Lucas's, the most interesting thing

was that after Marvel and Pixar were bought by Disney, they were basically left to do their own

thing. The sprawling Pixar campus in Emeryville, California was completely separate from Walt Disney animation. Although they shared a chief executive and they continued to share knowledge while releasing separate films. Marvel's studios had been bought to the big kids table under the leadership of Kevin Feige, and it was allowed to stay under his leadership with a few tweaks here and there for the sake of the Disney brand.

Bob Ager and George Lucas were brought together to launch a new version of Disney World start to his ride in 2011, and Ager shot his shot, bringing up the potential deal in the most natural, chill, normal way possible. By reminding George Lucas that he was about to die. According to Ager's own autobiography, he said, "I don't want to be fatalistic George,

“but I think it's worth putting on the table. What happens down the road? You don't have any”

airs who are going to run the company for you. They may control it, but they're not going to run it. Shouldn't you determine who protects or carries on your legacy?"

one of whom worked at Lucasfilm in a creative role, but it was a place so bold, it worked.

“George said he'd think about it, and he genuinely did think about it. He'd actually tried to”

sell Star Wars to Disney once before. In 1973, when it was just a ten-page treatment, cribbing heavily from Hidden Fortress in New Jimbo, Disney weren't interested, although Lucas would later insist that if Walt had still been alive, he would have understood Star Wars. Weeks after his meeting with Ager, George Lucas hadn't committed to selling the company. But he had started work on some new Star Wars films. Lawrence Cazden, writer of Empire Strikes

Back and Return of the Jedi, was hired to write a Han Solo film. Michael Ant, the screenwriter behind Little Miss Sunshine and Toy Story 3, was hired to write the screenplay for episode 7, based on an original treatment by George Lucas, who was also writing treatments for episode 8 and 9. There's kind of two ways to see George Lucas's decision to go back to where it all started and write a treatment for the sequel trilogy. It could be a sweet enough of the Disney deal,

a guarantee of ongoing relevance, and the first step for the new company signed and approved by Star Wars

original creator. That's definitely how Chris Taylor sees it in his book, How Star Wars Concord the Universe. But I can't help but see these sequel treatments as one final act of creative control from a man who struggled to let anyone else play with his toys. Lucas famously shadow

“directed Return of the Jedi, and the only thing that stopped him doing the same on Empire Strikes”

Back was his deep, almost childlike respect for Urban Kirchner, who, quote, "court him looking through the camera only twice and he looked at me as guiltily as if he'd stolen a cookie." When Dave Follony first pitched his idea for the Clone Wars, it was a series about a motley crew of mismatched personalities smuggling and doing petty crime around the galaxy, which George said no to, because "I like my own characters. I want to get Anakin and Obi-Wanan."

So while Lucas is descended into right treatments for episode 789 was dangled in front of Disney as part of the deal, I also think it was George Lucas's attempt to steer the ship before jumping over board. The other key appointment that Lucas had to make before the Disney sale was his successor as the president of Lucasfilm, choosing a success immense separating the

“myriad of roles that George Lucas had done since the company's inception. The roles of creative”

hive mind, producer, executive, been counter corporate face and vibe checker in chief. Lucas's

final choice had actually never worked at Lucasfilm before, but he had worked with them, and had

been instrumental in almost all the iconic films that came alongside Star Wars to define an 80's childhood. Kathleen Kennedy was responsible for 80's eyes. After quitting a job as a soul female camera operator at a local San Diego TV station to move to L.A. in 1979, she got a job as a secretary for director and writer John Millius, best known for his screenplay for Apocalypse Now. At the time, Millius was working as a producer on Steven Spielberg's 1941. The way Kennedy tells

it, she first got Spielberg's attention by volunteering to type up his notes, and took the random scraps of paper that Spielberg scribbled on and spent a weekend organizing them into neat, typed booklets. So Spielberg pulled rank and hired her as his secretary instead of Millius's. Kennedy was, according to Spielberg, a terrible secretary who didn't take notes because she was too busy pitching ideas. Spielberg quickly promoted Kennedy from his secretary to his assistant so she could

have a more creative role, and Kennedy would spend the next 30 years working with him, but E.T. was

the first film she produced. When the initial eyes for the E.T. puppet left the creature looking

dead and soulless, Kennedy went to the Jewelstein Eye Institute in L.A. and persuaded a young woman working there to let her check out their collection of prosthetic human eyes. After borrowing some colour samples and rushing them across town to the set of poltergeists, so Spielberg could sign off on them, Kennedy returned to the Stein Institute to beg the woman who'd later into the collection to paint the models for E.T.'s eyes. The woman actually wasn't allowed to be paid for any

work outside the Institute, so Kennedy furnished her apartment from the film's budget instead. While Kennedy has been a major part of Hollywood filmmaking for more than 40 years, she doesn't have the name brand recognition of a lot of her collaborators. Part of Kennedy's relative Anna Nirmity was thanks to her work as a producer, since most people don't actually know what a producer does.

sleazy power broker who knows all the right people and has the caching connections to make a movie,

“or break your career depending on how they feel on that day. Kennedy is more of a creative”

facilitator, someone who knows how to turn a director's ideas into reality, known by friends for her meticulous organisation, perfectionism, dogged attention to detail and nurturing the creation of complex characters in her movies. Others have called her intimidating and controlling. When Kennedy met George Lucas Fulanch in 2012, she thought it was just a catch-up with an old friend. When Lucas said he was thinking of stepping aside at Lucas' film, Kennedy assumed he wanted

to brainstorm his replacement with her. She started suggesting names and Lucas had to cut in and say

that he was thinking of her as his replacement. Kathleen Kennedy was never going to be another

George Lucas. She's a producer. She was used to dealing with logistics, development, and refining of creative ideas, but she'd never been a writer or director like George Lucas.

“To make up for that, one of Kennedy's first moves at Lucas' film was establishing the Lucas”

Film Story Group to replace the Star Wars hive mine that George Lucas had once been. The group was headed up by Story Analyst, producer, and screenwriter Keri Hart, and it's probably best known for the 2014 decision to declare the Star Wars expanded universe, dead, non-Cannon, out of history. A decision that has slowly been walked back over the past couple of years, but the story group have a much bigger role than just arbitrating what is and isn't

canon. The Story Group contributes to and collates the stories of upcoming Lucasfilm projects, maintaining continuity across the company both in terms of overall themes, and also picky world building questions. Like, is a band thorough carnival. As head of the Story Group until 2018, Keri Hart was kind of closer to being the Kevin Feige of Star Wars than Kathleen Kennedy was.

She co-produced Rogue One in the last Jedi, as well as working across basically every movie,

TV, show, game, book, and series of animated shorts to sell dolls. In some ways, it's a real bummer that Keri Hart is left out of most discussions of Star Wars, but it's also kind of a relief given the besocenistic vitriol that is leveled at Kathleen Kennedy, often just for being a woman involved with Star Wars. There's a lot of bad faith criticism out there about Kennedy, and a lot of it comes from a deeply misogynistic place. I didn't even really want to acknowledge it

because or not so fun fact is that there is a massive subculture of online Star Wars content particularly criticism of Kennedy, which is essentially just a funnel into the outright.

“However, it is important to say that Lucasfilm under Kathleen Kennedy is a fundamentally”

different company to what it was under George Lucas, not just because of the Disney takeover, but not at all because Kennedy is a woman. Kennedy was taking on a job that up until that point had one very specific meaning and one very specific person in it, and she was inevitably going to take the company in a different direction. It is possible to discuss and criticize her legacy without saying sex as shit. The New York Stock Exchange had just closed for the day on

October 30, 2012 when Disney announced that they were buying Lucasfilm for 4.05 billion dollars.

A little more than they paid for Marvel, but a lot less than Pixar. All $4 billion went to the company's one and only shareholder George Lucas to be paid half in cash, half in Disney stock. The sale was not a slam dunk. Disney stock actually dipped after the purchase was announced, and there was a lot of hand-ringing and consternation in the press. Bob Ayagas prepared statement published alongside the news of the purchase, emphasised two things. One that Ayagas and Skywalker

sound were part of the deal. And two, Ayagas announced work on episode 789 straight off the bat with a long-term plan to release a new Star Wars film every two to three years. But by cinema con in April 2013, Disney Studios had Alan Horn was announcing a more ambitious target. One Star Wars movie every year, with episode 789 locked and alternating pictures in between to keep the brand going. For comparison, when Marvel Studios was bought by Disney, they already had plans

laid out for phase one of the MCU with six movies due to be released over the next four years. Disney Pixar has a slightly lower output of roughly one film per year, but Marvel had source material and Pixar had the brain's trust. Lucasfilm had just lost its one consistent creative force, and even if George had still been there, Disney were about to make almost as many Star Wars films in five years as they had been in the past 35. The new films were big exciting news that

was shaved down significantly. LucasArts was accident entirely, killing the Star Wars underworld

“tie-in game 1313, and 150 more jobs were lost in 2013 to an efficiency review.”

The relaxed creative attitude that Lucas had encouraged with company picnics and salaried artists came to an end. After the cuts, the sleek letterman digital arts centre campus in San Francisco, which had once been jokingly known as the Death Star, got a new name among employees. Mashed wits. Star Wars 1313 was a casualty of the cuts to Lucasfilm. Star Wars underworld was briefly considered by Disney-owned network ABC, but a time of recording remains locked in a vault.

The Clone Wars was cancelled mid-season, with the last few episodes released on Netflix, rather than a original channel and Disney competitor cartoon network. In 2020, Disney Plus released another final season of the Clone Wars, which wrapped up a lot of the character arcs that have been

“left hanging by the show's sudden cancellation. It also went whole-hug on recycling elements”

from Star Wars underworld. There's an entire arc of a so-katerno living on level 1313 and dealing with the Pike Crime Syndicate. Lucas's protege day-falone was kept on to create another animated show, Star Wars Rebels, which had a lot in common with his original pitch for Clone Wars and followed a mottly crew of rebels swarming around the galaxy doing odd jobs and helping the rebellion. Many years later, Folloni would also get to direct some of the Mandalorian. A live-action Star

Wars spaghetti Western bounty hunter TV showed that is so deadwood in space, it has Timothy Oliphant as the sheriff. Like George had promised with underworld, the Mandalorian really did change the way TV was made with ILM Stagecraft, a digital background and lighting setup that allows crews to shoot

“most locations on one circular sound stage. Without a green screen, by instead having a digital”

background playing in real time while the actors are on set. The result is a set that is almost entirely artificial, but looks far more real than a green screen because the lighting actually interacts with characters, especially those in shiny Mandalorian helmets. It's hard to tell if this is the industry-changing technology that Lucas imagined, especially with the way that TV budgets have changed in the years since 2005. But it didn't hurt that the Mandalorian's director of photography

Greg Frazier got a chance to test out an early version of the LED volumes on Rogue One, developed with the help of John Noll. In February 2013, less than six months after the Disney purchase, Bob Aiga officially confirmed that Lucasfilm were working on two standalone Star Wars movies, one written by Lawrence Cazden and the other by Simon Kinberg. Kinberg was the right of behind Mr and Mrs Smith, Sherlock Holmes, X-Men 3, the last stand, jumper and Triple X

state of the Union. In the years to come, Kinberg would be known as Fox's go-to franchise superhero guru, producing Logan Fantastic Four and Deadpool, as well as writing the scripts for X-Men Days of Future Past, X-Men Apocalypse, Fantastic Four and X-Men Dark Phoenix. Kinberg is often said to have written a script for a Bob A-Fat film. He's denied that, saying that instead, he was part of a writer's room/brain-storming session with Cazden, Aunt, and Lucas, along with the

newly formed Lucasfilm story group. Kinberg co-created Star Wars Rebels in his time with Lucasfilm

before being drawn back to Fox and the X-Men franchise. He never wrote a standalone Star Wars film,

but he was attached to produce one with his Fantastic Four director, Josh Trank. With all this talk of standalone films, John Null dusted off his old Death Star Plan heist and ran it by some mates in the ILM corridors and cafeteria. He was now the chief creative officer of ILM and his pitch had changed a little too. Instead of mission impossible, it was 0-30. Null also added some elements of a World War II man on a mission movie with a team of military

misfits up against an unspeakable evil. At a trivia night, Lucasfilm SVP of technology Kinberg asked Null about this pitch he'd been hearing about, and Null did a half-hour version for the trivia table. LeBerry was the one who said that Null had to go and pitch this to Kennedy,

and Null realized that if he didn't, he'd always wonder what could have been.

So in May 2013, John Null met with Kathleen Kennedy and Keri Hart, to pitch his film "The Destroyer of World."

discover evidence of a secret weapon being developed during a raid on an imperial weapons facility. The team was led by Commander Jennerso, a 40-somethings battle-worn sarcastic true believer in the

rebel cause, who lost her entire family to the Empire. Also, second-in command was Drain Nevers,

a former imperial officer whose past life made him perfect for imperial infiltrations. The team's pilot, Ria Tuller, was a moderate Democrat kind of rebel who believed the main purpose of the rebellion was to put pressure on the Empire and force them to negotiate. She prioritised

“survival over doing anything to extreme and was in a secret covert relationship with second-in”

command Drain Nevers. Then there were some non-humans, K2SO, a matte black protocol droid, who Null stressed was not bumbling Kromic relief, as well as Aliens Lunak and Senna. Lunak was a cat-sides creature who could crack a safe and scurry through tight spaces, while Senna was a big, strong alien and demolition of the expert. The final human team member was Snapper Jaris Castell, who's character description is a lot harder to read in the tiny glimpse of this treatment that you can

get in one of the rogue one behind the scenes special features, so I don't really know much about this guy. Null's pitch has some genuinely great character dynamics, like how does Jen a jaded and cynical rebel commander work with an optimist like Ria, who believes that reconciliation with the Empire isn't just possible. It's inevitable. And how do both of them work with a

“defector like Nevers, especially if they're infiltrating an imperial base and his inside knowledge”

starts to look like a trap? Another thing that really strikes me about Null's pitch is that the whole things smacks of gender. Jen is absolutely the lead, but Null's character descriptions for the

pitch also list Jen first and Ria second, with Drain Nevers third, even though he's second in

command of the team, which suggests to me that Ria was the film's secondary protagonist occupying a similar place to Cassian in the final film. Ria was definitely written to be a foil for Jen, despite their shared goals, where this is a deeply personal mission for Jen, it's political for Ria, and she genuinely believes that the Empire can be reformed. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Ria and this version of Jen didn't make it onto the screen. The final cut of Rogue One

barely scraped past the Bechtel test, with two functional lines between Jen and Monmofma,

“but lead into a long discussion about Jen's two deaths. At the end of John Null's pitch,”

Kathleen Kennedy said, "Thanks, we'll think about it, and John Null went away, feeling that, hey, at least he'd actually pitched his idea." A week later, he got an email from Kiri Hart, saying that destroyer of worlds was going to be developed into one of the first Star Wars anthology films. Across Lucasfilm, people were delighted. Doug Chang, a production designer who'd been at Lucasfilm almost as long as Null and had worked really closely with him

on the prequels, immediately asked if they could set up a visual development team. Null kept building on his idea without a writer or director attached, adding in the character of Krenic as an imperial mole embedded in Jen's team. Concept artist Christian Altzman did a lineup image of the main team at which features in the Art of Rogue One Star Wars story. You can easily find it online. Jen, who is drawn with short grey hair and a scar down the left side of her face,

is clearly positioned as the leader, and Reya has this kind of cocky flyboy stance, but both the human men have what I can only describe as listening faces. In this lineup, Santa is drawn as an 8 foot tall green alien with the body of an elephant standing on its hind legs and the face of a squished hammerhead shark. With Luna, Connie's shoulder, this fuzzy little orange guy with a big bat face and frog feet. There's also a hint of aspirational casting to this lineup,

Reya has a strong resemblance to 0 dark 30 lead Jessica Chastain, and never sees pretty clearly

Michael Fassbender. There's a few other scraps of concept art from this development team in the Art of Rogue One, including an imperial corridor shootout and a bunch of different design options for Santa, including a long-haired polar bear creature who did end up in the final film, but this is kind of where the story of destroyer of worlds ends. Reflecting in 2017, John Null estimated that about 50% of his original idea ended up in the final version of Rogue One,

which is a pretty generous amount if I have to be honest. While Null would stay on the project as an executive producer and visual effects supervisor, as well as taking part in discussions

looking for people to fill those roles, and once they found them, destroyer of worlds would go through

“the first of many periods of change. On the next going rogue, a group of plucky young creatives”

are chosen for the mission of helping the Star Wars spin-off films. As Lucasfilm tries to weigh out,

what exactly has spin-off film is. The old Lucasfilm is dead. The new Lucasfilm struggles to be born. Now is the time of anthology films.

“Going rogue is written and presented by me, Tensy Gautam, with editorial assistance from”

Charles O. Grady and Christian Bias. Our music is by Kevin McLeod of Incompetek and Shane Ivers of Silverman Sound Studios. And our logo uses a photo by Anna Kim Nicholson. If you like the show,

“please tell anyone else you think would like it. If you hate the show, thanks for getting this far,”

but please never contact me. You can find a link to this episode's script with full sources

in the episode description, or on the show's Twitter account, as well as a transcript of the character list from John Null's original Rogue One pitch. Also, I need you to know the only time that I've been able to find this pitch. They did a focus rack across the sheet of paper. So to actually transcribe it, I had to screenshot a multiple points in the focus rack. What I'm saying is I would have been great at Q&A.