New Hints on Lucas' Future

That does ring a bell, but such involvement going uncredited isn't uncommon at all. Actually giving someone a screen credit for such assistance can cause all manner of problems with the various unions and guilds. Robert Towne was livid when a writer pointed out years later in a book that he'd done uncredited script work on a particular film during a writer's strike.

Actually, Body Heat's been on my "really must take another look at that one" list for a while - it's a very long list, sadly.

 

It's recounted in Dale Pollock's biography of Lucas called Skywalking. I would assume Lucas asked his name not be in the credits due to his issues with the Writers and Directors Guild.

 

Interesting, sounds similar to the reasons for omitting his scriptwriting credit on ESB and letting Brackett's name stay. The WGA seemed to have very bizarre rules. It's true Lucas's editing work has always been played down, but highly regarded by people such as Kasden and Spielberg.

 

The inter-cutting of across multiple stories and battles of the third act of ROTJ is almost comonplace by now but I think it was pretty revolutionary at the time. Empire kind of does it but really only does across two different sets of scenes in generally the same location (and the chase to the Falcon has ramped down by the time the Luke/Vader fight kicks into high gear), ROTJ is like 3 different stories across space/ground/Death Star. I think there was also another bit of stuff shot about an Imp Moff about to blow up the Endor but they cut it out.

 

The really innovative film from an editing standpoint was Graffiti. Four major characters arcs crosscutting and never intersecting until the final act. Films just were not made like that up to that point. You followed your main protagonist... maybe cut away to a subplot, but never in the fashion Graffiti did.