CT Special edition - worst and best changes

Yeah, and he's also pretty blatant in insisting that they're his films, at least implying that others directed the latter two just doesn't/shouldn't really matter.

 

If you want the control, you should go out and create something. It's that simple. If you want something to be yours, it has to come from you. You and millions of others can't just leech off of Lucas's soul and try to pass it off as your own.

 

Good thing it's not his anymore and Disney can rectify some of the horrid changes made...If they want!

 

O, come on, please! Pass off as my own? Where do you get this nonsense?! I don't want control over anything. We've been down this road countless times. Lucas made billions of us leeches. He spent twenty years marketing and milking these "rough cuts", hoping we would fall in love with them, and when we do, he tells us to get lost. So, yeah some us felt that was not very nice, to put it mildy, and we're still pissed off about it. It's his right to do with his creation, as he pleases, and it's our right to give our opinion on the matter, and convince the powers that be (aka the current owners) to do something about it, if they can. So, stop twisting people's words!

 

It's your right to have an opinion on the matter, but you're still framing it as some sort of moral issue where you and millions of others were personally affronted and wronged. I've never made any secret of the fact that that in particular is what rubs me the wrong way about all of this, and so far the way you and others talk about this issue has not changed even one iota--and so the conflict persists.

You don't own the art you consume. You own the feelings and the memories and inspirations the art creates within you. You own your interactions with the art. But you don't own the art itself, because the art didn't come from you. George Lucas didn't take anything away from you. He can't take anything away from you that actually belongs to you.


George Lucas doesn't owe you anything and he shouldn't have to feel bad about anything that he's done with his own films. You don't like what he did. You have a difference of opinion. That's it. You weren't wronged. Stop acting like a victim. It's tiresome and unattractive.

 

It is a moral issue, where the rights of the artist conflict with the public interests. In Lucas' own words:

"A copyright is held in trust by its owner until it ultimately reverts to public domain. American works of art belong to the American public; they are part of our cultural history."

"The public's interest is ultimately dominant over all other interests. And the proof of that is that even a copyright law only permits the creators and their estate a limited amount of time to enjoy the economic fruits of that work."

There's no doubt the original unaltered versions of these films are part of our cultural history. Ultimately the rights to the final cuts, and all archive material, including any "rough cuts" will revert to the public domain.

 

Good thing no-one is asking you out for dinner...

 

"There will only be one. And it won't be what I would call the 'rough cut,' it'll be the 'final cut.' The other one will be some sort of interesting artifact that people will look at and say, 'There was an earlier draft of this.' The same thing happens with plays and earlier drafts of books. In essence, films never get finished, they get abandoned. At some point, you're dragged off the picture kicking and screaming while somebody says, 'Okay, it's done.' That isn't really the way it should work. Occasionally, [you can] go back and get your cut of the video out there, which I did on both American Graffiti and THX-1138; that's the place where it will live forever. So what ends up being important in my mind is what the DVD version is going to look like, because that's what everybody is going to remember. The other versions will disappear. Even the 35 million tapes of Star Wars out there won't last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the DVD version [of the Special Edition], and you'll be able to project it on a 20' by 40' screen with perfect quality. I think it's the director's prerogative, not the studio's to go back and reinvent a movie." -George lucas


"And one of the great things about doing the Special Editions was we were able to go back and do the original Star Wars: A New Hope exactly the way George wanted it. The way he had written it. Whether people liked it, it didn't matter, it was his movie and he couldn't make it when he first made it because there were so many compromises he had to go through." - Rick McCallum


"You know, I was fine with doing it, I didn't feel at all that we were hurting anything. My feeling always was that the original version was always gonna be there, and I don't know if that's necessarily happened. George hasn't put the effort into doing an HD, super good HD version of the original versions and I don't know if that will ever happen. But at the time my feeling was that we could finally make these shots better, you know. He went through and picked a bunch of shots, and I picked a bunch of shots and we redid them so they just looked a lot better. I was fine with it, and I think it's gone overboard, I think it's been done too many times and too many shots, but I just feel as long as the original version is always there that it's fine to be able to work on it later on, and sort of like 'so what', you know?" - Dennis Muren

 

Ancient Whills

That's all good and well...but he's not just fixing things up - He is completely changing some things!

 

No, what's part of our cultural history is something to be decided after Lucas is dead and gone and has had whatever say he wants to have. That's why copyright law (ideally) expires years after the artist has already died, not the moment a movie happens to enter your gooey eyeballs.

That's why in France, where moral rights law is most robust, the artist even has the right to purchase back all copies of his work of art and prevent anyone from ever seeing it again, if he or she so chooses. That is the right of the artist. Art is an extension of the artist, and just as you do not own the choices, actions, or experiences of the artist during his or her lifetime, so too do you not own the fruits of that artist's expression, nor do you have the right to exercise control over the artifacts they choose to leave to posterity. The public does not own the product of the artist's expression in any sense until well after the artist him- or herself has left this mortal coil and had their full and final say, the way they want to say it.

Star Wars is not very old, Dr Dre. It's not a Molière comedy or a Caravaggio masterpiece. It's not the Rigveda. It's a series of movies made 40 years ago at the earliest. Its maker is still alive. The argument from cultural heritage is not nearly so strong as you seem to think it is. "Cultural heritage" isn't just a meaningless buzzword to be carelessly thrown around in defense of venal arguments. It actually means something. It has a concrete connection to our reality and the way it operates according to the laws of nature. Our "cultural heritage" is the result of individuals within that culture acting according to the dictates of their will and their conscience. That's where it comes from. It wouldn't exist if the interests of the culture at large were not initially made subordinate to that of the individual. Individuals have their say, whether the culture likes it or not, and then the individual dies, and the individual ceases to be a living entity and instead becomes a part of the culture, and by extension so too does their work, whether the individual likes it or not, because the individual is dead. This is all very natural and fair and logical, in my humble opinion, and I believe the only real reason you disagree is because you want Han to shoot first, dammit. I, personally, find it all very petty, though of course we all have our own opinions on the matter which must be respected.

 

Well, that's all a matter of degrees. Lucas himself mentions the creator (and his estate) as only having limited time to enjoy the fruits of their work. So, this statement clearly does not limit the public interests to just after the artist has died. The public interests and cultural history are relevant, even during an artist's life time. It is afterall the impact the art has on our culture, that determines it's significance, not it's age. So, while the artist's interests should probably weigh heavier during an artist's life time, or at least for a number of decades, the public interests are allways a significant factor, and become more dominant as time progresses. This is why the discussion surrounding Lucas' alterations is relevant, because he decided to alter his work and replace the original decades after it was first published, and had become ingrained in our cultural dna, and while IMO Lucas' rights weighed more heavily at the time he made the alterations (the current state is a bit of a grey area, now that he's sold his creations), public outcry is understandable.

 

The_Phantom_Calamari

I should add, that for me personally it's not about Han shooting first. Upon the theatrical release I thoroughly enjoyed the SE. For me it's about the look and feel of the films as I first experienced them. With each iteration these films have changed further and further, until they to me at least now feel like very different movies.

 

Ancient Whills quoted

"And one of the great things about doing the Special Editions was we were able to go back and do the original Star Wars: A New Hope exactly the way George wanted it. The way he had written it. Whether people liked it, it didn't matter, it was his movie and he couldn't make it when he first made it because there were so many compromises he had to go through." - Rick McCallum

Hear, hear

From the March 15, 1976 draft:


HAN
I bet you have…
Suddenly the slimy alien disappears in a blinding flash of light. Han pulls his smoking gun from beneath the table as the other patrons look on in bemused amazement.
HAN
… but it will take a lot more than the likes of you to finish me off…
Han gets up and starts out of the cantina, flipping the bartender some coins as he leaves.

And Gary Kurtz just pointed out that if Lucas had really wanted Greedo to shoot first, he could have already done that with the VFX Tools at his disposal in 1976 and 1977.

And here is a little anecdote regarding the Great Temple on Yavin IV:

Harrison Ellenshaw was given the task to turn McQuarrie’s artwork into a matte painting: “I had done squares, almost Mayan-like. I put it together, showed it to George…and he sat there in dead silence, which means he doesn’t like something. Then he said, “Would it be possible to make it look more like Ralph’s?” So I went back and repainted it to make it look exactly like Ralph’s painting” (The Making of Star Wars, also here)

So Lucas got exactly what he wanted in 1977, well almost:



The combination of the matte painting with the live-action footage resulted in incorrect shadow casting of the floor, but it could have been easily fixed for the SE as the "corrected" combination above illustrates.

Instead McQuarrie's Great Temple design contribution was drastically altered and Harrison Ellenshaw's beautiful matte painting (what you see above is an enlargement of the postage stamp size image in The Making of SW, hence the insufficient detail resolution!) was demolished, just as the ancient statue in the right foreground.

As it still looks to me, the young George Lucas acknowledged and respected the contributions of all the talents that helped his film to become a sucess, the old George Lucas just didn't care anymore and sacrificed these contributions just to create something new to lure audiences into theaters.

 

The latter point actually also is significant to me. People chance over the years, and decades. To me the original 1977 Star Wars and to a lesser degree it's sequels are very much the product of a young, ambitious film maker. The SE alterations and the newer films were made by a middle aged billionaire.

 

Double post.

 

It's interesting that the original shot of the lights representing the X-Wings streaking out of Yavin base to confront the death start is exactly what McQuarrie painted.

 

Yes, unfortunately that's gone with the SE.

As a matter of fact you can (still) hear the base controller overhead ordering to get the "launch tubes" ready, i.e. the fighters were apparently meant to be catapulted into the sky (IMHO that was an original SW idea hijacked by John Dykstra for Battlestar Galactica).

 

Here's a nice video on restoring that shot from Mike Verta:



and another on restoring the above shot of the temple matte painting:

 

I'm pretty confident Lucas ensured that they can't. Besides, if they had access to the previous versions, the most opportune time to cash in on them would have been in the lead-up to the release of TFA when the hype was at its peak.

 

I don't agree, a work becomes relevant when it is released. That is when it can make film history, enter public consciousness etc.
Star Wars made film history and entered cultural history in 1977, not 1997, not 2004, not 2010.
The impact was made back then.
Sure the other films that followed had added to it and kept in the public's consciousness.

A work can be reevaluated, re-examined or it's worth change over time. Sure.

In some cases a work might not have made a big impact on first release but became more well known later. The first Terminator film was not that big a hit but the second was.
The first Austin Power was likewise not huge but built it's audience on video.
That was however not the case for Star Wars.

From what I know of French laws, which isn't that much.
When it comes to films and movies, the authorship is a bit more complicated.
They are viewed as collaborative works, with multiple authors. The writer, the director, the composer of the score etc.
I read somewhere that for a film to be changed and a new version released, the director, the writer and the the DoP all have to agree to it.

Also, from what I've read, the author can not prevent private family performances after a work has been published.

In all, under French law, I think that Lucas would not have been able to do what he did.

A work does not have to be centuries old for it to be relevant or important.
The National Film Registry does not wait for the director of a film to die of old age before deciding if the film is important enough to preserve.

Film preservation has become more important over the last decades as older films has deteriorated and become lost. Their legacy forgotten.
Not all films are protected, choices are made and it is made by society.
A number of people think and decide which films are important enough for inclusion.
A factor here is the impact the films have made since release, what other people thought of it.

Artists make the work of art but the public decide if it is remembered.
If Star Wars had been released in 1977 and say ten people saw it. Then it would have been a flop, there would have been no more movies and current cultural and film history would have been different.

That is why if you ask a random person about Star Wars, the odds are good that they might at least have heard of it.
But if you ask them about "The other side of midnight." then they might not know the film.

I am sure that Lucas would like if the Holiday special was erased from history and I am sure other filmmakers have films they are not proud of.
I know Kubrick wanted some of his early films destroyed but that didn't happen.

[/QUOTE]

Well Lucas has said that he wants films he saw as a child to be preserved so that he can show them to his children.
So evidently, Lucas wants to preserve the original versions of films and so that they can be seen by later generations.
This however does not seem to apply to his own films.

Lucas has also said that it is important that future generations can see the past and present generations as they saw themselves.
Again arguing for film preservation.
That films are of their time.

Lucas has argued both about artists rights, that no one should have their work changed against their will. But he has also argued about the loss to society, film history and cultural legacy that happens when a film is either lost due to neglect but also if it is altered and the original is gone.
That second part becomes hollow if some people can destroy or alter works of art as they please.

Bye for now.
The Guarding Dark

 

Actually Kathleen Kennedy has already confirmed that no agreement is in place prohibiting the release of the OOT.

 

When did she say that?

 

https://movieweb.com/star-wars-classic-trilogy-disney-wont-alter-restore/

"During the course of the interview, she was asked about the original trilogy and whether or not they have any plans on restoring the theatrical cuts. While she revealed that there is no agreement in place to keep the Star Wars cuts as they are, she also made it clear that Lucasfilm isn't planning on messing with them."

She made those statement in the same interview where she allegedly said she won't mess with the originals, which some took as meaning Lucasfilm won't release the OOT, while others maintain she didn't understand the question and simply stated Lucasfilm won't alter the films to make another updated SE. Either way there's no agreement that prevents Disney and Lucasfilm from releasing the OOT.

 

She did say that there is no arrangement or agreement in place that determines which versions the are permitted to release. Which implies suitable extant variants that could be released, if they planned to.

 

It's a foregone conclusion that they will release 4K versions of the trilogy at some point, perhaps when 4K televisions are as prevalent as 1080p televisions to maximize sales. It's just a matter of what version of the trilogy it will be. Perhaps, as some have suggested, a newer final cut supervised by Lucas before the sale to Disney will be released alongside the theatrical versions. We know that Reliance Media has worked on some kind of restoration. The colors in that show reel are different than the Blu-rays.