It is insane how much George Lucas has edited the original Star Wars trilogy. I think no movies have had more edits over time than Star Wars.
I don't begrudge any director the freedom to go back and revise their work to more perfectly realize their creative vision. The problem is when they try to erase the original released version of an historically significant film by making it completely unavailable. George had no issue accepting the accolades and billions of dollars from the original trilogy. It's fine to later release his 'perfect vision' but in today's digital media era, there's zero reason or justification to make the originals unavailable. Be proud of what your younger self made and let fans decide which they version they want to watch.
I'm not just being post-hoc selective here. I think original theatrical releases of classics should remain available even in cases like Blade Runner where the OG theatrical release is a widely-hated, critically panned abomination made by a clueless executive producer without the involvement of the director, writer or main star and released over their strong objections. It is objectively awful and by far the worst release of the film - but I still believe even that miserable train wreck should remain available forever (perhaps with appropriate warning labels :-), even if only as a cautionary tale to future clueless executive producers).
Fortunately, we can still watch the Director's Cut. It's a shame, too, because the Final Cut has a lot of improvements otherwise (e.g. fixing Zhora's face is a major one).
Personally, when it comes to revisiting revered classics many years later, I think directors (even good ones) should focus on correcting obvious technical errors like matte lines in effects, muffled audio or the proverbial boom mike at the edge of a shot. They need to resist the urge to make non-technical stylistic changes like color grading or noise reduction (looking at you James Cameron). Things like adding back cut shots or recutting scenes to change pacing need to be carefully considered and only done when the original cut was obviously in error or not what the director intended at the time - perhaps due to not having time/budget to reshoot, overdub or being overruled by the studio or producer.
When a film has become a classic, and is of historic importance, it should be respected as an artifact of its time and a snapshot of a director's abilities, style and tastes at that point in their development. They should be thankful for the opportunity and stick to making it what their original intent was then, not what they'd do if they made it now. Otherwise, they're quickly on a slippery slope toward a strange stylistic hybrid between then and now.
James Cameron's Aliens "Directors Cut" is an example of a mixed bag. Fixing the VFX matte lines is a definite plus but the excessive noise reduction sucks all the texture out of the image. Adding back the lengthy sequence at the beginning of the film showing Newt and her family encountering the Aliens on the mining colony removes much of the suspense and mystery, making the film worse IMHO. Cameron cut that scene after test screenings for good reason which makes the addition feel like it was motivated by the studio's desire to market the Director's Cut with "X Minutes of New Footage!".
The same is true of the entire ~20 min French colonist digression in the Apocalypse Now Director's Cut. It's mildly interesting from an historical point of view but it brings the entire movie to a grinding WTF halt. It's a clear example of putting a mistake back into a film that should never have been in the script in the first place. The 'Newt's Family' scene in Aliens is just unnecessary but it was probably hard to know that until seeing a rough cut.
I think Aliens has a couple of additions that do make sense, Ripley being told of her daughter and the scene with the miniguns, but that's about it.
Agreed about the rest, you're basically reading my mind about how I feel about movies.
https://fanedit.org/what-the-final-cut-shouldve-been/ (check out the Changes tab)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsdmYjF_064 (trailer comparison)
https://archive.org/download/blade-runner-the-penultimate-cu...
Edit: looking at the list of changes, this is exactly what I wanted. Well, an excuse to watch Blade Runner yet again :D
In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing to support this idea. If I make something, I can change it however I want, as many times as I want, and throw away old copies - even if you really really liked those old copies. It's my art, not yours.
Maybe one could make the argument that George Lucas is not the only artist here, and I'd agree with that, but to imply that society is owed something that someone created of their own volition, simply because society happens to like it, feels wrong. He can change it however he wants until the day he dies, as far as I'm concerned.
After that day, I think the argument changes.
The timespan for which we grant a creator the sole right to decide about his work is arbitrary and, last but not least, almost all of our cultural works are derivative in nature, so what actually is our own work is equally arbitrary defined.
In the existing framework he can do what he did, but the current one is not the only possible.
It's not the creator's responsibility to facilitate that, but they also shouldn't be able to hinder it.
I think this is where most opinions differ.
Authors, painters, musicians (and at some points in my life I've considered myself among them) can have a lot of intent in creating something, and a lot of intent later to alter something, but at no point do I believe an artist owns their art once released/sold, outside of IP laws. What I mean is George Lucas has the legal right to only release the shitty remastered versions, but he certainly can't dictate they're better.
The whole concept of "death of the author" is about how regardless how a writer meant something to be interpreted, if another interpretation gets more traction, and is more coherent, it's hard to argue it's wrong.
What the movie means, how it affects people, how it reflects on the author, etc. are all out of his control, but the public doesn’t get to argue with him on what it actually IS.
Once the author dies, all bets are off because things must continue to change to remain accessible to others. Translations, data format changes, viewing methods, etc. all can require adaptations. Since we can no longer ask the author their opinion, we take the works as a whole. No future discussion of SW would be complete without taking time to reference the changes it underwent over time. If nothing else, it adds necessary context to understand the media.
IMO it’s also kind of a blessing. It gives us multiple angles to consider a work from when squeezing more meaning out of it 100 years down the road.
Or take video games, particularly 2d / pixelart ones - they were built for CRT displays and relatively low resolutions. They can remake them now with multiples of the original resolution and fidelity, but for many people it loses some of it. Some art doesn't translate at all - take this digitized artwork from Castlevania, which was digitized specifically for display on CRT displays but which loses all charm (e.g. the eyes reduced to a single pixel) when rendered somewhere else: https://x.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587
But this probably applies to film as well; if a film was made for a 35mm projector from the 70's, it won't look good or anywhere near that "experience" on a modern day 4K OLED display without editing.
At the end of the day I think the viewer should be given options and choices. And for a good while it looked like they would - with DVD and blu-ray offering options like different audio tracks, camera angles, and different versions of the same film in one package. But that never materialized because I suppose it's only a wish from purists. And at that point they're competing with piracy and internet hobbyists like the article.
> Consider film grain - it's an artifact, an unintentional or unwanted side-effect of how films used to be made.
I don't think it's quite so binary. Depending on the context and intent, film grain can be an undesirable artifact of limited celluloid chemistry, optics and available light. But it can also be an expressive aspect of the artistic medium no different than depth of field, focal length, color timing, grading, etc.
There are certainly examples of low light scenes where it's clear the filmmaker reached the limits of then-available optics and chemistry and they were forced into compromises such using higher-speed film and/or 'pushing' the chemistry during film processing. These can increase grain and the result is often shadow detail being lost in the noise floor. I agree that's always bad.
But there are also wonderful examples where directors and DPs very intentionally selected film stocks for their unique texture, gamma curve, color sensitivity, etc as an expressive choice. In those cases, it's no different than a painter intentionally using different canvas textures, brush bristles and pigment viscosity as part of their expressive palatte. In this form, the unique textures of different film stocks are often referred to as 'image structure' (a less pejorative term than 'grain' which is often construed negatively).
> But because it was a part of a production, people wanted it back
Artists hate any limitations on their vision, whether technical, financial or societal. They want maximum expressive freedom yet also grudingly concede pushing against limitations often elevates their work to new heights. When film grain was a limitation they struggled against, they hated it. When grain is an artistic element giving their image texture, they want in their toolbox.
To be clear, not all chemical, optical or technical limitations from the past were expressively useful. No VFX artists are pining for the black matte outlines from misregistered optical printing or generational mismatch in multi-pass composites. :-) Interestingly, as optics, lighting instruments and film sensitivity improved in the late B&W era, it was briefly trendy among some cinematographers to abandon depth of field as an unfortunate historical limitation of the past. Of course, it was just an over-reaction to a long-resented limitation finally becoming a choice and DoF remained an invaluable storytelling tool in the hands of a master (https://creativecow.net/depth-of-field-gregg-toland-citizen-...). I just want to avoid similarly over-reacting by dismissing the creative value of image structure and texture as we leave unwanted graininess in the past.
I suspect we'd have several enjoyable beers debating edge cases; which visual artifacts of past technical limitations can arguably have expressive utility to visual storytellers going forward and which have no real redeeming qualities outside retro callbacks and nostalgia? I'll nominate anamophic lens flares to start: https://theasc.com/article/star-trek-into-darkness/. My take: J.J. went overboard intentionally milking them in ST:ID but I'd be horrified if Spielberg digitally removed them from Close Encounters. Philosophically, I think the same principles broadly apply to retro gaming and preservation. So much so I built a custom arcade emulation cabinet around a 27" Wells-Gardner 9200 quad-sync analog RGB CRT and Radeon R9 380x. To me, it's about authentically preserving original artistic intent, especially when the original creators placed individual pixels by hand specifically to leverage certain analog video artifacts.
- people form a relationship with and an emotional response to the art
- they give you money for the art
Now, the latter gets into questions like Sony or Steam removing games or films which people have previously purchased. A consumer rights question. People tend to feel they have been treated like a sucker when the publisher does this.
The former you are effectively rescinding the emotional relationship with the art. A much more complicated question. This can certainly be pathological - see kpop and the idol industry. But I don't think it's unfair to say that insisting that the art relationship should be totally unilateral and you owe the audience nothing, is going to anger the audience.
You don't own art that has been released to the public, anymore than you own a car or pizza that you sold.
Buying a pizza does not give you any rights to force the owner to maintain that recipe you purchased a slice of.
You're correct. I did not.
> they now have some obligation to society, should society deem it good enough.
I was expressing a wish or, perhaps an ideal, not an obligation. I don't think there's any implied ethical, moral or legal duty on a creator to do what their patrons or fans want. As an amatuer filmmaker who's also worked in the industry creating technology for cinematic storytelling, I'm as pro-creator as can be.
And, full-disclosure, my feelings about Star Wars are 'complicated'. In 1977 I'd just become a teenager when I saw Star Wars at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. It not only rocked my world, it made me want to be a filmmaker and changed the course of my life. Turns out I was better at software than filmmaking. Fortunately, as film became digital, my interests collided :-).
Decades later my software was used extensively to make several Star Wars films including hundreds of shots in Phantom Menace. I was at the ranch many times during production and was back at the Chinese theater for the premiere of TPM - almost exactly 22 years to the day after my life was changed in that theater. Prior to the premiere I'd only seen storyboards and individual shots so, going in, my expectations were as sky-high as any fan. But, like many hardcore fans, I felt let down by Phantom Menace. Did George owe fans the film they wanted him to make? Nope, not at all. He made the film he wanted to make. Even though I was disappointed by TPM, it hasn't changed how much I respect George. He's still a remarkable filmmaker.
- there was a children's book (that my family had) that accompanied the movie
- there is a scene in the book where Biggs comes back to talk to Luke
- this didn't make any sense to me as a child b/c that scene isn't in the movie
- I realized years later that they cut the scene but AFTER the book was printed.
The scene in question is here btw: https://youtu.be/O7J_IZ9agRI?t=318
In the scene where the sand people shoot R2D2, it looked like the other way around so it was quite confusing to see them captured in the next frame. Who knew the little guy didn't have a blaster?
I think it's a really important scene, and I'm sad that it was cut from the movie.
Side note: the (extremely well-done) Star Wars Radio Drama [0] included a great many expanded scenes on Tattoine (with quite a bit of expansoin on Tosche Station), and I think those scenes (which include the aforementioned scene with Biggs) really add to the richness and flavor of the setting.
If you're a fan of Star Wars and haven't yet listened to the radio drama, I highly recommend it!
I think it's pretty clear to everyone now that when Lucas is flying solo his final output is... not great. He obviously imagined a universe a lot of people find compelling, but wasn't always the best person to realize the vision of that universe.
- Commander Worf, Take Me Out to the Holosuite (7x4)
One of the things I'm most looking forward to is watching the series with my kids when they're old enough.
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Unrelated but the TNG episode Tapestry also deserves a mention. [1] Wtf happened to media. Writers used to actually understand people, now everything is so trite.
I'm sad to say the newest Trek shows have just missed me.
Then there was Picard which actually showed some promise but I couldn't find myself caring about the new characters they tried to introduce on top of the layers of nostalgia. I heard it got a soft reboot or new writers for season 3 but I have no idea, I haven't heard anything about it.
Voyager was still good but that was the last show I actually watched on the regular.
Unfortunately, we don't have a Rick Berman, or anyone else that maintains the same ideals, at the helm anymore.
I don't think its mythology to claim that Marcia Lucas edited the films. It's pretty well accepted reality.
If the remasters and the episodes I-III are anything to judge by, George really does better when there is an editor that will check him.
I was just responding to the poster claiming it was some sort of feminist conspiracy theory to claim that she was an editor on the film and did a good job. She did edit the film, and a plurality of her peers thought the editing was a good enough job to award the most prestigious award in the industry for the work.
It’s well known that a group of fans who follow a certain youtube channel well known among star wars enthusiasts share the channel’s opinions on sites like reddit, and these became an oft-repeated myth spread there to discredit Lucas because they (like the channel admins) despise the sequel trilogy. They also don’t limit themselves to praising her editing work, but often claim that she was the _real_ creator of star wars and Lucas wouldn’t have been anywhere near as big without her. I don’t have any side on this, I am not particularly fond of the sequel trilogy nor a big fan of Lucas, but what I do dislike is the myth-making constantly pushed about various things on reddit.
I consider her a part of what makes the original trilogy great but I don't think it diminishes Lucas' contribution. No one person is "what makes it great". Plus the internet loves the underdog or a a "TIL"
The evidence is pretty compelling that George had a lot of great ideas as well as some not-so-great ideas and his own ability to distinguish between the two was... less than ideal. Thus his best work was from those times he collaborated closely with talented people who had significant input and there was a strong, empowered curator. Positive examples include the great results on Star Wars, the fact that Empire is so good and his work on Raiders with Spielberg. A clear negative example is Phantom Menace where George was in absolute control.
A lot of fantastically talented creators simply shouldn't have unchecked 'final cut' over their own output. It's really nothing to be ashamed of, and frankly, is more common than not.
https://www.rogerebert.com/tributes/the-woman-who-saved-star...
The changes are mostly just window dressings around the original footage, like extra CGI in transition scenes. They don't really change much of the core movie experience. It does end up causing some funny side effects though. Like when the main characters move from one place to another you'll see a splashy dinosaur like creature or fancy robot, but once they actually arrive in the scene the background falls back to the original with a lot less of that added CGI action.
I was talking to Bob Gale once about this topic and he said that him and Zemeckis had put a veto clause in their contract when they sold BTTF to Universal in the 90s giving them the power over any later fuckery with the releases, while they are alive. This was during the height of the 3D TV craze and he said Universal had asked for permission to do a 2D->3D conversion of BTTF and both Bobs had refused. So there's one franchise at least that won't get dicked with in the near future.
[I'm not totally against 2D->3D conversions if done right. The Titanic conversion looks like it was filmed 3D-native, beautifully done. The Star Wars: Episode 1 conversion is essentially unwatchable and killed the whole project.]
Very little was really lost IMO if you look at those movies with an eye free of nostalgia, but I'm sure many MANY people would disagree with that.
I think the main series has turned to trash, but isn’t it still commercially successful? I personally adored Andor, but even my parents couldn’t sit through the first couple episodes because they’re slow moving.
On the other hand there are signs of the brand wearing thin in places, Mandalorian vs. Grogu was a critical and commercial flop (assuming the usual 2x budget for marketing, if it was more for marketing then it might have been significantly worse than just breaking even).
The trend is really clear though, and it's not going in the right direction for Disney. Obviously they have the resources to reverse that, but the question is if they have the vision and the will.
We watched it yesterday at home and it was… a strange movie. It looked like it was shot on the same stage they use for the show, the budget seemed far lower than other Star Wars movies, and the story was confusing and rambling in a way my children had a lot of difficulty following. I’m glad I didn’t see it in theaters.
If you haven't seen Moana 2... well, don't watch it. And I say this as a parent who watched Moana and loved it. But if you did watch Moana 2 and thought the plot didn't make any sense, it's because they planned a whole TV show then turned it into a movie at the last minute. This resulted in delightful moments like a villain that comes out of nowhere, and in the course of her intro song has a heel-face turn without any explanation, then disappears out of the movie forever.
Marc Bernays Randolph, cofounder and first CEO of Netlifx is nephew of Edward Bernays who is nephew of Sigmund Freud. Edward developed propaganda in 30s in US, later, after Goebbels did same, renamed to public relations. Nowadays, we have Netflix doing same.
To such a sentiment, I can only say ... maclunkey.
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