Rick
McCallum
A Profile Of The Producer Of "The Phantom Menace"
by Michael Johansson
6/27/99
We all know that Rick McCallum is the man who makes all our dreams come true in Episode 1. But how many off us know what he did before he met George Lucas?
McCallum began his career in the musical Pennies from Heaven
in 1978. Later, in 1983, he was a stuntman in Lone Wolf McQuade and continued to
work with Dennis Potter on the movie Dreamchild as a producer. Dreamchild
won 3 BAFTA awards and Coral Browne won an Evening Standard Award for Best Actress.
McCallum tried out acting in The Patriot as the character Hairy Hand. After trying
out in front off the camera he returned to the producer chair. In 1987 he co-produced Link,
the same year he met Nicholas Roeg for the first time in the movie Castaway. And
the next year he continued working with Nicholas Roeg on Track 29. And later that
year he was involved with the HBO film On Tidy Endings, a movie that won 4 cable
ACE Awards and was one of Rick’s most successful . He returned to work with Dennis
Potter in 1989 on the mini TV series Blackeys.
1989 proved to be a productive year for Rick. That same year he worked along side David Hare on the motion picture Strapless featuring Bridget Fonda and Blair Brown. He also directed DeepStar Six, where he also worked as a creature puppeteer and a stuntman.
In 1990 he got involved with George Lucas in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. The series, about Indiana Jones’ boyhood adventures, was filmed over 4 years in 27 different countries. That hard work paid off well when the series received 26 Emmy nominations and won 11. It also won a Banff award and got a Golden Globe nomination. The directors for the Young Indy series includes Billie August (formerly married to Pernilla August, Shmi Skywalker in Episode 1), Nicholas Roeg (with whom Rick worked in two motion pictures) and David Hare (another director with whom Rick worked with before). After working with George Lucas on the Young Indy series they made Radioland Murders together in 1994.
In 1995 McCallum did his latest stunt in the movie Tough and Deadly. He has also done the music video for Rolling Stones song Undercover, which won the MTV Awards for Best Video of the decade.
So Rick has done a lot more than just Episode 1. And he will be very busy the next 5 years with 2 more Star Wars episodes to do and the new Indiana Jones movie that to be released July 2001. (And a little Star Wars trivia: I think that most off you out there didn't know is that Rick played an uncredited Storm trooper in Star Wars Special Edition.)
(Michael Johansson is a huge Swedish Star Wars fan and starter of the Swedish fan site Kraften (translated to "The Force").)