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The film editor’s blade is mightier than the scriptwriter’s pen?
This post is part of our Group Writing Series under the January 2020 Group Writing Theme: Winter of Our Discontent. Share your tale of winter, discontent, content, or maybe tell us a tale of someone done wrong by an author or film maker. There are plenty of dates still available. Our schedule and sign-up sheet awaits.
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Nice piece, Gary.
My wife, my son, and I were sitting in the theater, giant popcorn in hand, on the opening day of Star Wars. My seven-year-old son and I had looked forward to this day for months as speculation about the movie drifted about.
I had no idea there was so much drama, however, behind the making of the film.
Great post, Gary.
I’ve seen some of that deleted footage of Luke and the gang. Compared to the finished product it all seems wildly out of place, even if they were talking about wamp rats. They all come across as chuckleheads, instead of the Luke, touched by destiny, feel in the final cut. And just the line from the aunt to the uncle was enough to set up meeting the friend later. “Most of his friends have already gone.”
Invented in 1973, four years before, in a story by Paula Smith parodying a certain style of submissions to her Star Trek fanzine. It spread from there to science fiction criticism generally and escaped into polite society over time. It describes a character possessed of superhuman levels of ability with no development arc whatsoever and usually a proxy for the authir. Sort of a two-legged deus ex machina.
Wow. Not much of a Star Wars fan but your knowledge and insights are fantastic! Thanks!
I’ve been hearing more about Marcia Lucas and her role in making Star Wars what we love over the past few years. She played a huge part.
It shows what an art film making is. I hear critics complain that some films use too much dialog. “It’s film. Show us.” But then here George was trying to show us and it turned out a few pieces of dialog could tell more. I guess it also depends on what story you’re trying to tell. As you point out, we ended up with a different understanding of Luke.
Thank you @garymcvey – your background insights and revelations are always intriguing. I’ve long thought that some writers – and other storytellers- really only have one story they simply must tell. I don’t mean the writers of series who follow a formula- I mean the serious writers who bring the same questions and impulses and motivations into their characters in every story. It seems they just don’t know how to answer their own questions. From your disclosures, it seems that it took a third party (Marcia Lucas) to keep George from trying to tell his story – again. It certainly would have been a different movie. Thanks!
Thanks, Gary. An interesting story. A good editor is worth his or her weight in gold.
Your posts are so much fun, Gary. Thanks for continuing to pull back the curtain on what we think we know about such things. Neat stuff!
Luke also comes across as whiney in a way not at all befitting an unlikely hero.
Very interesting. Finally somebody on Ricochet mentioned a film I’ve seen: American Graffiti!
Your description of the process makes me want to see Star Wars, too! Maybe I’ll get around to it someday. It doesn’t sound much like the film that provided a thousand sermon illustrations back in the day, too many of which I heard myself while sitting in a church pew.
One of that parts of that story that got left out was the Lucas (George) didn’t want the early scenes of Luke to begin with. People who read the early script that was closest to the finished film (there were so many drafts) complained that it was too much like THX-1138. All robots and Sith Lords. No humans. So he brought Luke in earlier.
The original edit does not stick with Anchorhead for 20 minutes. It bounces back and forth between Luke on the ground and the droids and Leia in space. But no, the Anchorhead scenes are not well made.
This video is pretty fantastic and sums up the original post (and some of my comments as well).
Here’s the original trailer for Star Wars. Without Ben Burtt’s sound, the final edit, and of course, John Williams’ score it looks like something to be avoided even if you’re starving for science fiction movies in 1976.
There seems to be competing impulses to say that “Lucas was a hack who had good people around him” and “Lucas was the sole creator of the genius that was Star Wars.” There is ample evidence that Lucas’ instincts in most cases were spot on. But there is also evidence that other voices such as Marcia Lucas and Gary Kurtz were part of the recipe.
Given the acrimony of their divorce there has been a concerted effort over the years to erase Marcia from the Star Wars history.
On the divorce: It’s interesting to read the transcripts of the story session for The Empire Strikes Back and then Return of the Jedi. On Empire every one of Lucas’ ideas are fantastic and his reasons are spot on. But on Jedi his ideas are indifferent at best and terrible at the worst. He doesn’t care anymore at that point.
As for “saved in the edit” even on American Graffiti George was telling his actors “I’m shooting it now and I’ll direct it when I edit it.” Someone once said that Lucas only wrote movies so he’d have something to shoot and he only shot movies so he’d have something to edit. That was always his first passion.
Oh, and there were further changes after the film was released in a handful of theaters in May and when it went wide in June and July. (If you can hear the mono sound mix it’s a much better mix. It’s the one with “Close the blast doors!”)
I recently watched Star Wars with my wife — who didn’t think she’d ever seen it — and though this was my 847th time seeing it, this time I was really struck by the pitch-perfect pacing of it.
The only time the pacing felt off was (surprise!) with the new stuff that Lucas stuck in there for his special editions.
Marcia is a large contributor to my daughter’s nonprofit that teaches social emotional learning to under privileged children. Her and George have been very generous.
Great recounting of the creative process that made Star Wars what it is. Marcia deserved that Academy Award for Film Editing.
Luke is still pretty whiny in the finished film. “I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!” “But it’s a whole ‘nother year!”
You know, that can be fixed, right? I haven’t seen the SE’s in so long I find them especially jarring now.
So much fun reading the backstory to the making of the film, Gary! Thanks! And the video that @TallCon included really brought back sweet memories.
I was going to mention this as well. My friends and I would throw out the power converters line in conversation occasionally. Anakin came off a bit whiny in the prequels and we joked that it must be a Skywalker thing.
@susanquinn when you posted about The Blizzard of 1978 I restrained myself from mentioning all of the ways it tied in with both Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Back then everything was about Star Wars. These days it’s only mostly about Star Wars. :)
That’s certainly what Lucas was going for. But he never managed to make it believable in Anakin’s case.
Yeah, I’ve got the DVD release that included the non-special edition on a second disc. (Yes, I know it’s not entirely un-changed from 1977.) But we were watching the Blu-Ray.
I don’t remember Star Wars well enough to be sure, but for him to start whiny and grow out of it would make sense.
Nobody has said it yet, so …
Han shot first!
As you were.
Just a slight change.
Greedo never got a shot off. No Maclunkey!
The best single work I’ve read on the development of the script is Michael Kaminsky’s e-book The Secret History of Star Wars. In 1977-78, Hollywood’s easiest targets of ridicule were the executives at other studios who passed it up. Most of them took their medicine in silence, but Universal’s Ned Tanen offered the sheepish defense that few people had any idea how convoluted the original material was.
It does a good job. There’s actually more than one comparison video out there, and they differ in detail, I’d guess because they’re based on the moving target of a changing edit. I oversimplified to keep this already-long post closer to Ricochet length, so you’re right, the film didn’t stay entirely on the ground, but broadly speaking Anchorhead was, well, as heavy as an anchor.
Given the acrimony of their divorce there has been a concerted effort over the years to erase Marcia from the Star Wars history.
You’re right; In the early years Lucas was fairly generous about acknowledging her contributions. That changed. To be fair, as pointed out in the OP there were other suggestions from people like Lucas’s pal Steven Spielberg, and the OP short-changes George just a little. Whether or not the edit ideas were originally his, he bought into them. He wasn’t a passive bystander.
Someone once said that Lucas only wrote movies so he’d have something to shoot and he only shot movies so he’d have something to edit.
Stanley Kubrick also said that.
If you can hear the mono sound mix it’s a much better mix. It’s the one with “Close the blast doors!”
Even in the first interviews Mark Hamill mentions having to redub some lines because Lucas wanted the mono mix to be great. This was no minor esoterica, because in 1977 35mm optical stereo sound was still a novelty; the vast majority of non-70mm theaters would be playing Star Wars in mono.
When we turned two of the Ricochet Silent Radio scripts into actual recorded programs, I finally really discovered what Lucas was talking about 43 years ago; there are big differences in the way you mix stereo and mono if you need dialog to be clear.
Now imagine 20 straight minutes of that.
She really did. In recent years, Paul Hirsch wrote his memoirs of the experience, with a slightly unhealthy high dose of “Vitamin I”. Hirsch points out, correctly, that Marcia was gone for some of this time, working on Scorsese’s New York, New York, and by the very end of editing Hirsch was the last of the three main editors left. Hirsch can be credited with working with George to turn Darth Vader’s exit into a literal “spinoff”. But the big changes that are the subject of the OP happened while Marcia was around. My claim isn’t that she was the only competent editor there, but she was the one who could best sell changes to George.
I appreciate the correction, Percival! Before a few years ago, I’d never heard the term.
I had a Star Wars picture book with photos from the film that included that shot of Luke raising his binoculars, as well as one of Luke talking to Biggs (wearing a black cape!). The text of the story included both scenes as well. It must’ve been prepared and sent off to the publisher before the final cut of the film.
I used to read his website. Never dropped the dime on buying the book, but with an actual recommendation I’ll have to see about that.
J.W. Rinzler’s The Making of Star Wars is quite good too. If you think his books are a soft-sell, read The Making of Return of the Jedi. It’s certainly warts and all.
It’s remarkable how doggedly Alan Ladd Jr. stood by the movie through it’s production.