The circle is complete today; the beginning is now at an end. Perhaps the greatest movie franchise of all-time, "Star Wars" has grossed over $3.5 billion in box office revenue worldwide and boasts a fan base in the hundreds of millions. Rick McCallum, producer of Episodes 1-3, does not see this as the end of big-budget, cutting-edge films, but rather as a new beginning for both "Star Wars" and the film industry.

When the prequels began back in the late 1990s, a significant rift developed within the fan base. McCallum says he saw the problem from the beginning. "Way back in 1990-91, when George (Lucas) told me "Episode I" was going to be about an eight-year-old boy, I just looked at him with horror in my eyes, and he said, 'Yeah I know, we're going to get creamed for this.' People in their 20s and 30s who had grown up on the original films just loathed Episode I, and then there were the kids who responded very well to it." With the prequel trilogy officially complete with today's release of "Episode III: Revenge of the Sith," McCallum feels at ease, "I think we really brought peace to the galaxy with Episode III, people seemed to respond reasonably well to this one - this was the story they all wanted to see.

Known affectionately as Director George Lucas's right-hand-man - and less affectionately as his boot-licker - McCallum wasn't always on the fast-track to big-shot producer-hood: "My major was comparative literature, so there was no other real job I was going to possibly get."

But life works in mysterious ways, as confirmed by McCallum's discussion of his first encounter with Lucas: "I was working on a very low-budget film in the same studio as George and he was working on "Return to Oz," this big-budget American film." That encounter led to a friendship that would make McCallum the producer of the "Young Indiana Jones" TV series and then the "Star Wars" prequels.

Much like Lucas himself, McCallum is an outspoken critic of the mainstream Hollywood establishment: "Hollywood - is run by corporations and it instills nothing but fear - there are about 350 studio films made every year - yet you have to ask the question: Why are so many of them so bad? And partly that is because of the process. I don't believe freelance, creative people can do their best in a fear-based environment."

Indeed he hopes that Hollywood will stop dragging its feet and be more open to change, saying of the legacy of his film: "Well, I hope, (20-30 years from now), no one even sees the films, because they're just a momentary blip on the horizon. Truthfully, when you think on the impact we have on popular culture and actually changing people's minds, we should be a quantum leap ahead of where we are now these multi-billion dollar businesses need to start putting money into changing the very nature in which we see movies, the way in which we make them."

Fanboys who think life without new "Star Wars" material will be as bleak and hopeless as a duel with Lord Vader need not fret. McCallum assures us that the proposed live action TV series is still a go; "We haven't sat down and figured out what all the scripts will be, what all the characters will be, but it will be much darker, much more character-based as opposed to plot based. When we're finished it'll be 100 hours, all set in that 20 year period when Luke is growing up - Probably within a couple of months we will be in full force and we should start shooting at the beginning of 2007."

Also on the horizon is the re-release of all the films, in cutting edge 3-D using a recently developed post-production format that has awed big-budget film all-stars like Peter Jackson (whose "King Kong" will be released in 3-D later this year), Robert Zemeckis and James Cameron. "(We have) a new wireless technology that uses 3-D glasses, but allows you to be in any section of the theater in any seat and see true 3-D without any eye-strain," McCallum said.

He is annoyed, however, by apathy of theater-owners in improving their theaters to accommodate cutting-edge technology; "This will help spear-head digital cinema, because you know theater-owners are so greedy that maybe at least they'll see this as an alternate form of revenue for them. (This new 3-D technology is) more by accident than anything else, starting to spur digital cinema because you can only see it on a digital projector. As soon as we have 1,500-2,000 digital screens in the United States, that's when it'll be economically worthwhile for us to start, sometime in 2007, start releasing all the films in 3-D.