Raffill shot the scene on at Malibu Creek State Park, which was owned by 20th Century Fox at the time. Before he can drown in the lake below, MAC dives in and saves the day. After catching MAC rummaging through his new home, Eric tries to catch the extraterrestrial critter - and winds up ramping off a cliff in his wheelchair. The first is Paul Rudd's personal favorite.
#Movie mac and me 1988 movie#
But anyone watching the movie in 1988 could tell you that only two scenes would stand the test of time. MAC and Me features 99 minutes of family squabbling over what to do with an alien (wacky!), harmless action sequences involving two nefarious FBI agents, and reminders that hugs, smiles, and friendship are the foundation of positive living. There was just one nugget McDonald's insisted upon: Ronald McDonald shouldn't appear on screen.Įxcept he did, and that was an artistic choice. The director says MAC and Me needed to live up to McDonald's brand - dress code, food code, fun image - but the intention was to promote the House Charities, not the hamburgers (though Raffill says the company did provide lunch). Louis never met Steven Spielberg, but confirms his producer at the time, Kathleen Kennedy (now President of Lucasfilm), saw and approved of the finished product.īoth Raffill and Louis say McDonald's offered only a few notes on the script. MAC could stretch across the windshield of a car like sentient glob of Gak. Key differences included giving MAC a family (reunited at the end, in a court scene where the aliens are legally awarded immigration status - seriously) and giving the main character special talents. "I was very careful to make sure that MAC did not resemble E.T," he says. "They said, 'We want you to write about an alien and a boy.' So while I was doing the pre-production on the picture, I was writing the script in my hotel room on the weekend." (Louis disputes the anecdote, saying he had "people that I wanted to work with" once the script was done.) This browser does not support the video tag.Īs Raffill considered the requirements of working with alien puppetry and his disabled actor, Louis made sure MAC and Me would distinguish itself from its predecessor. "They shouldn't have had a crew on the payroll, because it was costing us tens of thousands of dollars a week to maintain that," he says with a laugh. There was a crew on standby, ready to shoot something. Raffill claims that when Louis signed him to make MAC and Me, there still wasn't a script.
Louis eyed Raffill because "he could deal with children, he could deal with animals, so he fit the persona that I needed out of a director." The well-intentioned charity hook of MAC and Me appealed to the director, so he signed on. Stewart Raffill had experience with low-budget genre movies, finding success in the early '80s with the Star Wars popularity-siphoning The Ice Pirates and military-themed, time-travel movie The Philadelphia Experiment. With the right director, who needs a script? With money secured, Louis started the easy part: replicating the success of E.T. McDonald's was Golden State Foods' sole client, and when Louis pitched Williams on MAC and Me, the food maven saw an opportunity to give back. During his hustle to obtain the restaurant's rights, Louis met Jim Williams, the president and CEO of Golden State Foods, a food processor and distributor that supplied meat, ketchup, lettuce, onions, and the secret Big Mac sauce for McDonald's franchises around the country. McDonald's didn't directly fund MAC and Me, according to Louis, though financing still came from within the family. "I'm still the only person in the universe that ever had the exclusive motion picture rights to the McDonald's trademark, their actors, their characters, and the whole company." "We became the first to really get into the business of selling product, movies through McDonald's," Louis recalls, a deal that would foreshadow Disney's decade-long cross-promotional agreement with the chain in 1996.
#Movie mac and me 1988 for mac#
He extolled his vision for MAC and Me to anyone and everyone at the company: Not only could there be a cardboard MAC in every McDonald's advertising the theatrical run, then pushing video cassettes when the time came, but the movie's profits would benefit the Ronald McDonald Children's Charities. Louis spent three years bargaining for the movie and television rights to the McDonald's brand.
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