Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
January 1977: George Lucas in Winter
Christmas 1976 rolled over into New Year’s Day and the Bicentennial year was over. A Democrat was about to take over the White House, always a happy event in Hollywood. As January began, the town went back to work, crafting 1977’s most hotly anticipated hits: A Bridge Too Far, with Sean Connery, Robert Redford, and Ryan O’Neal; a new James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me; The Deep, from the author of Jaws; and a pair of highly touted dramas celebrating the viewpoints of women, Julia and The Turning Point. Woody Allen and Burt Reynolds also had movies on the way.
Everybody was poised to get rich or richer during the upcoming summer gold rush. But 20th Century Fox started the new year with a costly hangover. They’d spent two years backing a dubious novelty, the American Graffiti guy’s quirky tribute to the forgotten world of Flash Gordon serials, rumored to be something about a gorilla who flies a spaceship and a mystical force called “The Power.” From the screening rooms, word was filtering out: Star Wars was likely to be a loser—dull, confusing and corny, despite a couple of great special effects shots. The rough version was a mess and an unbreakable release date, May 25, was breathing down their necks. Thank God, Lucas stepped up and took charge of fixing it.
Marcia Lucas, that is. Far from just being the director’s wife, she was a respected film editor much in demand. She’d already edited films for Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma. Marcia Lucas worked with two other accomplished editors, Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch (Hirsch, in particular, would have a long career), and the narrative neatness of the Lucas-and-Lucas storyline shouldn’t leave them out of the picture. But at this turning point in the fate of Star Wars, they didn’t have and could never have had the no-nonsense clout with George Lucas that Marcia did.
Some words about what a movie looked like while it was being edited: Right up through most of the ‘80s, editors worked on a cheaply and quickly made copy of the 35mm film—the “rushes”—which would get cut up, scratched and dusty during the edit process. At this stage, colors and brightness varied from shot to shot, and the original sounds of, say, a sword fight on an armored space station sounded like two guys with wooden broomsticks, huffing and puffing while shuffling around on a plywood floor. Missing special effects shots (which on this picture were taking forever to finish) were temporarily titled as Sequence Missing. This made it tougher than usual even for jaded, experienced film pros to fully imagine the image-and-sound impact that this finished film would have.
For decades, studios “previewed their movies to death,” refining rough edits in response to real audiences. But crucially, by the time of Star Wars, directors with the strongest contracts were (nearly) all-powerful compared to the strict studio controls of classic-era Hollywood, or even of present-day Hollywood. Secretive directors like Kubrick or Lucas declined to have early preview audiences decide how to finish their pictures. Lucas had a wonderful contract, thanks to his legal eagle, Tom Pollock, and a patient, gentlemanly paymaster for a 20th Century Fox boss, Alan Ladd Jr.
Once all the edit decisions were made, and the music and sound effects all in perfect place and mixed together, only then were the working picture and sound elements replaced in the lab with pristine, polished ones. In the pre-digital era, that was an unavoidable, months-long lab process. It all had to take place by the end of April. That’s when finished, permanent film prints would be provided for nationwide advance shows to local film critics and theater owners. You couldn’t duck those screenings no matter how big a deal you were. That meant that even with the opening date still four months away, in January 1977 there was literally not a moment to lose.
Most of the film’s problems were felt to be in the first act, and that’s what got changed the most. It wasn’t exciting and audiences were not getting into the characters or story.
Like the movie we all know, the rough-cut version begins with the famous intro crawl, the text introduction to the story that stretches out to the vanishing point. Unfortunately, it didn’t focus audience attention. It was nearly twice as long as the finished version, written in the floridly yakkaphonic mythological style later given free rein in the prequels. Then it got back in the Star Wars groove with the iconic space chase with laser blasts that begins the action. And we cut to—
A bunch of teenagers laughing it up somewhere in the desert on the planet below. One of them, obviously a main character, notices traces and light flashes of the space battle visible in the daytime sky and raises a set of futuristic binoculars to his eyes. For most of the next 20 minutes of Star Wars, we remain on hot Tatooine with the cool kids, like rural California kids with little to do, riding around in hovering speedsters, holding races, and hanging out at teen-oriented hangouts. The hot-rodders of American Graffiti on Mars, in effect, was probably a major come-on to the studio that helped sell the picture to Fox — a somewhat different picture than the one we know. Superficially, though, it made some sense, relying on referencing Lucas’ popular triumph of 1973.
It was also classic, recommended story structure: get the lead actors in early so the audience cares about them right from the beginning. Luke’s very name is a tipoff that he’s a stand-in for Lucas himself, just as the earliest descriptions of daring, risk-taking Han Solo match those of Lucas’ slightly older friend and wildly successful mentor, Francis Coppola.
Sticking with Luke’s story took much of the momentum away from that slam-bang opening. In this early 1977 cut, even after the droids are sent to the surface, more time goes by before it begins to directly affect Luke. He’s back at the metaphorical Mel’s Diner, talking about how much he wants to ditch this soul-deadening farm planet and see the galaxy. It establishes motivation; to George it was a big scene, a key scene for Luke. We’ve now spent most of the first third of the whole movie with Luke on Tatooine.
That was slashed. It meant dropping a lot of the young adult American Graffiti stuff, which was part of Lucas’ thoughts that reflected his own long-ago divided attitudes about leaving Modesto, and tied in wider attitudes about American small towns and nostalgia in an ironically futuristic context. It’s been said that there are two types of film editing, the deftness of the scalpel and the decisiveness of the meat ax. Someone who could say no to George was going to have to use that ax on fiercely defended scenes that he spent years writing, scenes that took millions of dollars to film. Saving Star Wars required somebody talented, ruthless and unfireable. Marcia Lucas was that person, put in place by des-tin-y.
Now, in the cut we recognize, we stay with the action in space. The audience is focused on the primal battle of good and evil that starts the film. Sympathy with the rebels and a boo-hiss reaction to the forces of the Empire starts early and never lets up. The movie undeniably ran faster and more excitingly now, with better-defined conflict. It looked like the way to go, but there’d be some price tags to deal with. They had to make sure the loose ends of this fairly radical chop could be handled, storywise and every other way. It meant that when rebel pilots who were apparently Luke’s friends on Tatooine show up at the Death Star attack briefing and the attack run itself, we don’t know who they are, but the Lucases decided it was clear enough in context and got away with the continuity jump. Fortunately, there were later bits of dialog that recount discarded scenes you no longer see, like bull’s-eyeing Whomp rats and stunt piloting.
The way we’re introduced to Luke now, the way we’ve accepted for 43 years, is a woman’s voice calling a simple farm boy to dinner, accompanied by music, a lightly sweet, sentimental restating of the film’s theme, like a scene from Lassie Come Home. It’s an amazing change in perception: the same actor, same footage, same everything else as in the cut a few weeks previous, but the mid-story sudden intro to Luke subtly makes him seem more like a dutiful 16-year-old boy, not a fed up, ready to leave 18-year-old man. A character more akin to one in The Wizard of Oz than to The Last Picture Show. This change, in turn, meant that Luke’s character was no longer the unquestioned center of the movie. The modern term “Mary Sue” hadn’t been invented yet, but not actually seeing minute after elaborately produced minute of Luke doing all of these things as a skilled, cocky teenager took him down a bit in our eyes, made him seem a bit of a Mary Sue. Now, as a dynamic male lead, Luke Skywalker would be overshadowed by Han Solo.
There were other mid-picture changes in Star Wars between January and late February 1977 but the biggest remaining change from the January cut was a crucial change in the ending, sharpening it greatly. In the version we’ve always known, it’s a desperate us-vs.-them, good-vs.-evil situation, with the rebels trying to blow up the Death Star, and the Death Star only moments away from destroying the rebel base. It’s a film editing classic, illustrating one of the oldest film tricks: cross-cutting between two parallel opposing paths of action.
But it didn’t start that way. In the chill of January, the attack on the Death Star was basically Pearl Harbor in reverse; the bad guys are sitting around having coffee and the good guys suddenly appear and blow them up. There was no parallel action. That was invented in the cutting room to intensify the drama, and it succeeded brilliantly. The actors, sets, and props were long packed away, so the editors worked with what they had, shots of Peter Cushing ordering the destruction of Alderaan and Imperial technicians preparing to fire. They used a new voiceover about the Death Star soon being cleared to fire and placed it over a pensive, unrelated close up of Carrie Fisher. They filmed a no actor, no sound, low-low cost shot of a translucent screen, animated to show the occlusion of the planet in the shadow of the Death Star. It not only made the ending much, much more suspenseful; it gave it greater moral force. If the Nazis are two minutes away from using an atom bomb on us, then at all costs we need to wipe them out first; that’s the stark logic.
The result is film history that’s lived on for more than 40 years. Victory has a thousand fathers. It’s only human nature that the stunning box office victory of Star Wars led to competing stories about who deserves credit. Memories change and come into conflict, sometimes for honest reasons.
Can we say that Star Wars, one of the most successful works of outsider art of all time, was saved in the cutting room? Not from the point of view of the many fans, from May 1977 to the present-day, who would have loved it at any length. But if Marcia had indulged the inner George, would there have ever been so many of us to begin with? Of course, we’ll never know.
Published in Group Writing
The Star Wars Storybook. The novel (ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster) has the scene as well – and the scene with Jabba the Hut. (One ‘t’.) As did the Marvel comic adaptation. AND the radio play! By the time I finally got to see the scene as filmed it was quite dissapointing.
Some of that can be found here:
It’s actually content that I wish had made it into the final movie, particularly because Biggs shows up later in the attack on the Death Star, but I don’t see how it could be reinserted without really messing up the pacing.
Brian Daley’s 13-part radio adaptation does a good job with it, suggesting that Luke is possibly seeing a different space battle, and carrying with it the idea that the rebellion against the Empire is now big enough that they’re even seeing evidence of it way out by Tatooine.
Yep. Take a look at the 1977 advertising artwork; the key image is a muscular young man with his shirt half-open, raising a glowing lightsaber over his head. The princess is right behind him, exposing a curvaceous leg. I like Hamill and Fisher as much as any other moviegoer, but that image kind of betrays the difference between the way Lucas imagined the characters and the way they appeared on film. The secondary ad, closer to modern memories, is a Bond-style mashup of the characters firing ray guns; Luke is in the lead, with Han Solo now prominent but behind him.
By contrast, the poster image of “The Empire Strikes Back” is almost all Han and Leia, the “Gone With the Wind” pose of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’ Hara. Call it “Gone With the Stars”.
By all accounts, Laddie was a thoroughly decent man. Fox wasn’t Lucas’s first choice of studio, but he rationalized it, saying “At least they’d had the ‘Apes’ films”–had some experience with selling science fiction. Alan Ladd Jr’s independent company later produced “Blade Runner” and “The Right Stuff”, both of them pretty well thought of now, but neither of which was a big success initially.
I’m not sure who added the music, but the original Star Wars in much more sparsely scored than the other films. Only 70 something minutes of music in the 2 hours of movie.
Once you start getting especially nerdy about it you realize that Biggs would have had to get back to his ship, jump ship, find the rebellion, make his way to Yavin, and become an x-wing pilot in something like two or three days. (Luke meets the droids the next day, and the day after that he goes looking for Artoo and meets Ben. Being generous about travel time to Mos Eisley might give you a day more. Then the Falcon blasts its way out and off we go.)
Nope, same battle. It’s just that you hear Luke’s part in episode 1 then it jumps back in time for episodes 2 and 3 to tell Leia and the droid’s stories. Somewhat later on when Luke meets Threepio he has a line along the lines of “I told Biggs I saw a battle!”
I adore Rogue One all to pieces but I like Leia’s story better in the Radio Drama.
Agreed. Though I still like the idea of it being a different battle that he saw, because it suggests that even the outer territories are going to get drawn into the conflict whether they want to or not.
Yes. I guess I’m also nerdy, because this occurred to me as well.
Excuse me, but no. Tatooine is an important waypoint in the hyperspace corridor, so it wasn’t really the boondocks. Like an offramp and a gas station. “Way out” would have been some distant planet not often visited by Imperial traffic.
I mean, really, do I have to say these things? Can’t people do a little research before posting things like this?
(kidding!)
This discussion of editing reminds me of a story I heard when I was doing consulting work at Fox in 1995. We were interviewing the head of productions (I’m sorry, I can’t remember his name, but he went on to to be James Cameron’s opponent on the Titanic set since he was in charge of controlling expenditures and Cameron wasn’t interested in control).
At any rate, Fox was just beginning to use digital editing tools, specifically Avids, a purpose-built platform for film editing. He told the story of how they were able to do twice the amount of editing in a given period of time. His comment was that this enable Fox to make Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie an OK title instead of a really bad title.
What was interesting to me at the time is that it was clear that if you doubled the speed of editing, as a director or producer, you did not cut the cost of editing by half. You did twice the amount of editing. Productivity enhancements would always go into the creative side instead of coming out of the production budget.
Lileks thinks Tatooine and most science fiction planets are essentially gas stations in North Dakota.
If Greedo never shot, then Han shot first.
QED
If you ever want to start a bottle fight, show up at a SF convention and assert that Paul Atreides was a Mary Sue.
A fair amount of that progress can be chalked up to George Lucas’ investments in the EditDroid system. This was a descendant of the Seventies-era CMX system, funded by CBS. EditDroid was somewhat similar to today’s hard disk drive-based edit consoles but was run by having all footage transferred to laserdisc, which gave it near-instant random access. This put a short delay in the production process, brought in a third party, and eventually Lucas sold his patent rights to Avid.
Avid was, at first, an “offline” system. It was halfway affordable because so much of its innards were adapted from the PC industry. The screen resolution was fine for editing work but wasn’t nearly detailed, nearly good looking enough to do more than provide a digital list of edits for another, separate machine to assemble. It wasn’t a real-time process. But in the Nineties it was a revelation. Gradually, Avid became good enough to be used directly–its output was good enough for TV production. It became an “online” machine. When used for feature film production it yielded a finished list of precise cutting points for splicing film negative.
George Lucas wanted the prequel trilogy to be digital start to finish–“filmed” electronically, edited digitally, distributed on hard discs and digitally projected. But there were very few theaters equipped for it in 1999. By the time of the second one, 2002, there were more, and by the final prequel, 2005, they were crowding out film-only theaters.
Thank you Gary for filling in the details. We are now 100% digital. Archive is sending LTO tapes to three different locations in the US.
One relatively minor thing that struck me about the radio adaptation, and I admit I haven’t replayed it in many years: some of Obi Wan’s dialog sounds almost libertarian. The freebooting smugglers of Mos Eisely? On the radio, old Ben explains that they live by their own moral code and enforce their own rules, with the casual implication that enforcement was distinctly non-bureaucratic.
George Lucas has always been an odd political mix. A professed liberal, he’s also called himself the son of a conservative businessman, and a good part of the nearly universal popularity of the film n 1977 was its celebration of victorious combat, and in its vague, mystical Seventies way, religion. In an age of wokeness not wholly unlike our own today, Star Wars stood out. In that sex-saturated era, it seemed crazy to think that a chaste kiss before a Tarzan-style rope leap would make an audience cheer out loud.
Also ‘Star Wars’ wasn’t even supposed to be Fox’s big science fiction movie release for the summer of 1977 — that was supposed to be “Damnation Alley” with its post-nuclear apocalypse storyline. Movie fans decided instead they wanted the optimism of Lucas’ vision instead of that dystopian view (though that type of view would work out later for George Miller and Mel Gibson in the Mad Max series):
I always thought that when George and Marcia divorced, George lost the person who could tell him “NO” and who could rein in his less focused ideas of which we saw too many in the second trilogy of Star Wars.
We did wait 20 years for the next trilogy since George wanted Marcia’s rights to expire.
So, that’s how we got Jar Jar Binks?
I’d say that was Gary Kurtz.
Not sure the math works out. The Phantom Menace is 22 years after Star Wars but only 19 years after The Empire Strikes Back. 20th Century Fox had a chunk of Star Wars but George owned Empire and Jedi lock stock and barrel.
My understanding of the story is that George sold pretty much everything he could (including Pixar!) so he didn’t have to share any of Star Wars with Marcia. (Not sure where Indy falls into that.)
If you watch one short movie this decade, let it be this 8 and a half minute short movie in Comment #43.
Arahant, this merits its own post.
What nonsense. Tatooine is the quintessential boondocks. It is the planet that is farthest from the bright center to the universe. There’s no Imperial presence, just your local bulk cruisers, not the big Corellian ships.
George Lucas started four companies to deal with issues–problems, really–that he had during Star Wars. They were meant to be profitable, not vanity projects.
EditDroid would make it faster and easier to edit; he got a lot of ideas from Francis Coppola, the pioneer and chief booster of editing films on videotape. Lucas lost money on this one, mostly because of tech timing: videotape was now cheap enough to allow “banked” or “battery” systems of, say, sixteen Beta or VHS machines, each with a few minutes of transferred tape, so it didn’t take that long to come up with the shot and the exact frame you wanted (even perfectionist Stanley Kubrick used it on Full Metal Jacket). True random access editing had to wait for hard disc systems, but they were clearly around the corner. EditDroid’s commercially viable heyday came and went quickly. It was noticed widely within the industry that George didn’t use it himself.
For all Lucas owed to the experience and cleverness of his effects team, and all they owed him in terms of the careers launched by Star Wars, it was a testy if not outright acrimonious relationship. He started Industrial Light and Magic based on their work. ILM pushed the state of the art with film; Pixar would revolutionize special effects, using digital technology instead of tried-and-true photo-mechanical camera and lab tricks. Lucas and Spielberg were friends, but Lucas made a point of subtly one-upping his pal, saying he couldn’t and wouldn’t accept Hollywood’s practice of having outside experts do his shots. “After six months, they call you in and say, ‘Here’s your special effect, sir'” ILM made money, Pixar stayed experimental until it was sold to Steve Jobs.
THX would upgrade theater sound, a largely ignored backwater of the movies once the first disruptive waves of widescreen and magnetic stereo soundtracks began to recede after the mid-Fifties. Kubrick was also dissatisfied with the way his hard work was reaching the screen, in too many cases, but Lucas had the commercial clout to force (so to speak) the upgrades. Dolby noise reduction and stereo optical soundtracks came along at about the same time, so THX became a promise of premium quality. It was a modest moneymaker for George.
Standing on my seat cushion in the theater — emitting shrill war whoops: Fhew!! Fhew! Fhew-ie!
Not only do I want to add some thunderous applause, I want to read this to some movie buff friends who will love it to death as well.Thanks so much Gary for a fine bit of entertainment, right on the coldest day in January we have had so far. (A five logger, it’s going to be, once the fireplace is made ready.)
Gary, how much time did you spend researching and writing this post. I can’t think of any subject that I could write about at this length without significant research, that would also be interesting to other members.
Wow, what a kind reaction! Thanks, CarolJoy! It’s cold out there, all right, but probably not as cold as the look George Lucas gave Brian De Palma 43 years ago next month when a screening ended and De Palma turned to him and said, “Your movie sucks, George.”
Then you must put in a lot of significant research, Spin, because your posts have regularly been interesting to me and many other members.
Like other fans, I’d long known there were missing scenes, but that’s not unusual on any film. I’d even heard about some of it from the inside; in the ’80s and ’90s, I’d meet technicians and artists who worked on the film, like Peter Kuran, Chris Casady, and Dennis Muren, who still had a strong mixture of admiring Lucas and being mad at him (the feeling was probably mutual). They hinted at wasting time working on scenes that were dropped, then getting yelled at because producing the FX shots fell behind schedule. About a year ago, my son showed me one of the YouTube comparisons of the January 1977 edit and the finished film as released in May. Interesting, I thought. The way the edit changed our perception of Luke is basically my own angle. A few weeks ago, @cliffordbrown issued the Winter of Our Discontent theme and I remembered 1977’s biggest surprise at the movies. It didn’t take long to write, and I went back to an e-written account (The Secret History of Star Wars) and a book, “George Lucas and the Digital Revolution” to check dates and facts.
I started into this assuming you had the year wrong. The ice planet Hoth was from 1980.
When Carrie Fisher first hosted SNL, she had a beach scene where she whipped off her Princess Leia robe to reveal that she was wearing a gold bikini underneath, and I use the word “reveal” advisedly. For about thirty years I remembered it, logically enough, as being after “The Return of the Jedi” in 1983. Makes sense, right? Hard to mistake a memorable image like that. But it’s actually a 1978 episode; they hadn’t even filmed “Empire” yet, let alone “Return”. The gold bikini was coincidental, a trick to lull careless historians, especially male ones.
Or was it? I’ve since wondered if that image was lodged somewhere back in George Lucas’s mind, and used four years later without recalling the exact source.