'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. 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.

1980s movie mac and me