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Comment by dghlsakjg | Hacker News Reader

She won the Oscar for editing "A New Hope"

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.

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Marcia Lucas along with two other editors won the Film Editing Oscar for Star Wars/ANH/Ep. 4 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1dW6bNBzN8&t=52s ): she was no doubt a very good editor. Neither she nor the other two "saved Star Wars in the edit" in the manner often claimed. For example, Marcia Lucas fought to keep the teen-movie version of the opening with Luke meeting Biggs and others at Tosche Station in Tatooine, while George Lucas had always preferred to begin the Tatooine segment with the droids https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olqVGz6mOVE&t=1407s .

There’s no way to know one way or another whether her editing “saved” it. There’s no other original edit without her, so it’s an unfalsifiable claim.

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 a repeated pattern, not really a conspiracy. Of course, some patterns are basically considered abhorrent to notice.

The noooticers are known to spot all 11 of the recent 2 conspiracies.

It's reasonably clear that Star Wars would have been in some trouble if it had come out with anything like the original John Jympson edit, and in that sense it's fairly safe to say that Star Wars truly was saved in the edit. (Though that's also not very surprising, as by all accounts it's not particularly unusual for a good completed film to have had a shaky first edit.) But it seems that all the evidence suggests that George Lucas was always unhappy with Jympson's editing and understood its problems, and that it was he who selected three professional editors including Marcia Lucas to work on a re-edit which achieved his high-level creative intentions and was closely and actively supervised by him, and in which he did some of the hands-on editing to boot. There doesn't seem to be much to support the idea that the (other) editors took Star Wars out of the hands of a hapless George Lucas and bestowed on him a film which had been reworked beyond his own capabilities or vision, which is the usual "saved in the edit" claim, let alone that Marcia Lucas alone was largely responsible for that supposed feat, which is what was claimed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49883758 .

Again, I never claimed she wasn’t good at her job or didn’t earn some credit for her work on New Hope. I guess I wrongly expected HN users to have better reading comprehension and nuance than redditors. My point was entirely that in this specific instance, her contribution was overemphasized by a brigade of redditors spreading misinformation.

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.

Do you mean the prequel trilogy here?

Yes, got mixed up a bit between real world chronology and the star wars one.

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