His complex assignment began long before the cameras started rolling and continued long after they had stopped – almost a career in itself
I have worked on THE BLACK HOLE for two years and the major problem when I first started was that we really didn't have a story that everyone was happy with. After about four months of working with writers, we finally settled on what kind of picture we were going to make. The next problem that we had to face was to salvage all of the hardware that had been designed and built a year prior to that and get everything together so that we could make a picture without having to completely start over.
Peter Ellenshaw had been on the picture for about a year before I came onto it, supervising the production design and building models. We wanted, as I’ve said, to retain what he had built, even though we were going to film a different story. It's really not fair to comment on the original script, because when it was written – five years ago, or perhaps longer – it was written for a specific audience and was to be a specific kind of Disney film. When the producer passed away it was shelved. Then a couple of years later, after STAR WARS was released, Disney revived the project and it was felt that the concept they had approved three years before might not be right for the audience they would be going for the second time around. They decided to make it a different kind of picture and new writers were brought in to work on it. They had been struggling with the script for about a year before I came onto the picture. I went to work with the writers and Ron Miller and some other people and we came up with a satisfactory story line for the kind of picture that we were going to make.
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