CT Why Does Lucas Owe Us the O-OT?

Yep, he's an entertainer. Glad you're off that "artist" kick. Oh wait...

A painting is a unique object and is usually out of reach for an average person, while for these movies we're talking about mass produced copies. So I think it's an analogy fail.

Kids spraypainting on walls don't need to listen to anyone either. I'm sure they consider themselves artists too.

If that happened, I doubt GL would be in a position to wrestle control from the studio and "remake" them.

Is it that time again to declare how the BR set was teh biggest selling movie evar?
____

Van Gogh didn't have a team of people painting his pictures for him btw.

 

But sculptors and architects worked with a team, nonetheless,are considered THE artists of their creations.

 

I would like to know just how "sellout" came into this.

Is it "selling out" to release your products for sale? You do it to make money sure but is it "selling out"?

I just bought the movie Thor on Blueray. I saw earlier this year and now I bought it. Does this make the persons behind the movie "sellouts"?
For myself this seems like a common practice, you relase your movie and then later you release it on DVD or Blueray. Lucas have released the O-OT in cinemas, several times, so why would it be "selling out" for him to release it on Blueray?

About the sales figures. You can not use them to say that very few wants the O-OT. Why? If you have a big city but there is only ONE restaurant in the entire city. Then this place can be both expensive and have rather poor food and it will still make money simply due it being the only one.
The SW Blueray was a choice between something and nothing, so persons that would have prefered the O-OT could still have bought it anyway because there was no other choice. I did, mostly I was interested in the extra material and less the films. I have not actually seen any of the films yet and I've had the set for some weeks now.
The only way to make any kind of statement of how many would prefer the O-OT would be if there were TWO DVD sets or two Blueray sets put on sale at the same time. One with the O-OT and one with the SSE. Then you can see how well each set sells.
But Lucas has been carefull not to let that happen. First only the SSE was released on DVD and the O-OT was released much later and in substandard quality. On Blueray only the SSSE has been released.

Regards
Nordom

 

I think it's worth pointing out that analogies with paintings or buildings fall apart because they are works of art rooted in a single physical object. The work exists only in that single object, and it's impossible to create a modified Mona Lisa without destroying/overwriting the original.

With film/home video, this is not and has never been the case, especially now in the digital age of lossless transfers.

Lucas doesn't HAVE to destroy the O-OT to give us the SEs; he chooses to.

 

Lucas doesn't HAVE to destroy the O-OT to give us the SEs; he chooses to.

Yep - it's a very odd and unnecessary situation that he's created for himself.

Personally, I'm perfectly happy with the SE's - but I'd probably shell out for the original versions as well as I'm such a big fan of the films.

Ultimately the posters who say it's his decision are correct. But it's an appalling decision. His reputation, even among Star Wars fans who should worship the guy, has taken a massive hit.

There really isn't any justification for it. Doesn't really affect me, other than I think it's a shame that such a talented and inspirational figure should become so despised by large numbers of people for no good reason other than stubbornness.

 

If a film is in the national registry, it should be preserved.

The appropriate approach is the one Spielberg took with E.T. -- preserve the original and simultaneously tinker with a "living" version.



?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 in "An Expanded Universe", American Cinematographer magazine, February 1997.




"The destruction of our film heritage, which is the focus of concern today, is only the tip of the iceberg. American law does not protect our painters, sculptors, recording artists, authors, or filmmakers from having their lifework distorted, and their reputation ruined. If something is not done now to clearly state the moral rights of artists, current and future technologies will alter, mutilate, and destroy for future generations the subtle human truths and highest human feeling that talented individuals within our society have created.

[...]

People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society. The preservation of our cultural heritage may not seem to be as politically sensitive an issue as ?when life begins? or ?when it should be appropriately terminated,? but it is important because it goes to the heart of what sets mankind apart. Creative expression is at the core of our humanness. Art is a distinctly human endeavor. We must have respect for it if we are to have any respect for the human race.

These current defacements are just the beginning. Today, engineers with their computers can add color to black-and-white movies, change the soundtrack, speed up the pace, and add or subtract material to the philosophical tastes of the copyright holder. Tomorrow, more advanced technology will be able to replace actors with ?fresher faces,? or alter dialogue and change the movement of the actor?s lips to match. It will soon be possible to create a new ?original? negative with whatever changes or alterations the copyright holder of the moment desires. The copyright holders, so far, have not been completely diligent in preserving the original negatives of films they control. In order to reconstruct old negatives, many archivists have had to go to Eastern bloc countries where American films have been better preserved.

In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be ?replaced? by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be al

 

janstett, You cut and pasted all the talking points from the originaltrilogy.com clan perfectly. Bravo. Except you fail to mention the critical distinction in your claim of Lucas' hypocrisy -- he wasn't talking about artists making revisions to their own work. He was talking about corporations or second parties altering OTHER artists' work years after the fact. The "copyright holders" he was referring to in 1988 were companies like Turner Entertainment, who purchased the MGM library from decades past and then started colorizing movies hoping to make a buck. The original directors and cinematographers were either dead or weren't going to have a choice about what was done to their work. That's different from an artist making revisions to his own art.

 

Lucas wasn't arguing that in the quoted part. Lucas wasn't speaking about director's altering their films, he was talking about history being allowed to be forgotten and not preserved. The part in his speech about director's wishes being respected wasn't being quoted. If you actually care to read what he said, he clearly isn't talking at all about a director altering their films, but the films he saw as a child--which are what they, not when a director makes a different, later re-edit of those films--being preserved and not revised, and not having their negatives replaced with altered versions posing to be the same thing.

Read it.

 

Anybody got a link to this Lucas speech that gets quoted so often here? Before I make my own opinion of the speech, I'd like to read all of it.

 

To my own chagrin, I have to admit that I'm swinging towards the "let's just forget about it, GL & LFL have no intention of doing a restoration &/or re-release of the OOT, this just isn't worth the effort" side of the argument.

Not because I agree with what's happening - I think this burial of a classic film in its original form is just plain wrong - but simply because it isn't going to happen, & the OOT isn't exactly 'lost'. Later down the track, it will be possible to resurrect the OOT from private collections, perhaps not as well as it might have been, but it's not lost forever.

This is not the same scenario as The Magnificent Ambersons or Greed - their original versions were destroyed completely & somewhat deliberately. Future generations were denied the possibility of ever seeing the superior cuts. If this was the case with the OOT, it would be worth campaigning for, but it's not. Yes, the OOT deserves a proper release & acknowledgement from its owner, but GL has made it clear he's got no interest in doing so - anyone really interested can dig out old VHS tapes or get a hold of the 2006 DVDs.

It sucks, but as far as future generations are concerned, there will be higher quality transfers that will emerge from illegal copies, along with some utterly hilarious discussions regarding the absurdity of auteur theory. Some of us here on the TFN forums right now may even be quoted in some beret-wearing idiot's thesis.

"Who knows? In a thousand years, even you may be worth something!"

At some point, one has to admit that the brick wall isn't going to fall down - save yourself the brain damage & just wait for the guards at the gate to drop dead.

 

Where's the link to whole text? I mean a verbatim unedited transcript of his official testimony from beginning to end. Just so we're on the same page.

 

The full text is available from the United States government publications, available at some libraries that have such collections.

The entire debate was framed around the Berne Convention for Moral Rights, which filml industry artists were lobbying congress to recognize. This would allow them to prevent studios and rights owners--namely, Ted Turner--from altering the films on the ground of moral rights of the director and screenwriter. It was about directors being able to make sure the films remained as they were released--authentic preservation of films as they were. That's why Lucas talks about preservation, and cultural heritage, and things like that. Directors altering their work, or having the right to alter their work, never entered the picture, and was never under discussion. What they were discussing was the ability and necessity to prevent films from being altered. (The term "Director's Cut" had hardly even entered the lexicon at that point as a version of the film offered to audiences, and wouldn't really until the 1990s)

This is self evident if you simply read what he says. The directors there weren't seeking to alter their films, or to gain the right to alter their films--that wasn't something they ever considered. They were there for the opposite reason--to make sure their films stayed in exactly the same form as when they were released.

 

So you don't have a link to the whole text? Where's the version you're reading?

I'm confused. If the subject of directors altering their own work never came up, why is the testimony cited as evidence Lucas is a hypocrite?

 

Because he speaks about properly maintaining, preserving and making available classic films in the form in which they were released. As you may have heard, he stopped doing this with the Star Wars films.

 

That may be your interpretation. Do you have a link to the version you've read so I can read it for myself. Sometimes its all in the context. You clearly know the text well. Can you point yours out to me?

 

I agree with you on the first point--the film is not 'lost' in the same way Magnificent Ambersons is.

But I must disagree on the second--just put it out of mind and wait. Because by then it will be lost. If you can only campaign for something once it is truly and unrecoverably lost, what are you campaigning for? Something that no longer exists. You can't get it no matter how hard you campaign, because there simply is nothing to get. You have to campaign before that happens, to prevent that from happening, when the danger presents itself.

If Lucas is serious, and he certainly seems to be, he may very well be successful in destroying the films. By the time the film has become public domain, all those private prints won't be useable--they don't have professional storage facilities, most of them just sit in a basement or storage room, at best you might have a guy crazy enough to devote an entire fridge in his cellar to storing Star Wars (not very likely) but even this is not good enough for long term storage. Library of Congress has a print, but Lucas has been trying to prevent the LOC from properly archiving them! The LOC put its Star Wars print on secure status, but only because they were able to use savestarwars.com articles as a researched proof to the higher-ups there that the films needed better protection. But who knows, the way the law is right now, I think Lucasfilm might be able to ask for it back.

So, 1) The campaign is needed now, before the films do become lost, which they are on their way to right now, and 2) The act of campaigning to see them preserved has made a few inroads that may now give us a chance at a medium-quality preservation in a hundred years when the films become public domain (guess three generations will have the films suppressed to them).

 

That's not an interpretation, that's what he says. He says it in the parts already excerpted here, and he has said it in other interviews before and since. He's a member of the Film Foundation preservation board.

 

But can you direct me to the complete text you've read so I can see for myself? I see excerpts in various places, but I've not seen the whole unedited text. Apparently you have. May I see it too so we're talking about the same thing?

 

There is nothing in the fuller version that isn't in the excerpt; it's rather representative.

This is the most complete posting of it:

http://savestarwars.com/lucasspeechagainstspecialedition.html

There is another page on his various stances on film preservation:

http://savestarwars.com/doasisay.html

 

So, you have the full version? Could you post it or provide a link? I just think it's fair to start with the whole unedited text.

Those links, those are excerpts, right? The site doesn't have a complete unedited version does it?

 

Just a naïve question from a non movie-making specialist. Is there no way at all to start from the OO-T versions available in the 2006 limited edition DVD, enhancing them in order to get the best picture and sound quality, then making a new physical or digital master print or copy, someday available for theaters or new OO-T higher quality DVD or Blue-Ray release ?

Is this definitely impossible ?

 

The 2006 DVDs have definitely been ripped, turned into digital files and are now easily available on the internet. The discs themselves are now out of print, but the digital files on them are forever in the ether. Can they be "enhanced"? Probably, for dirt and other obvious blemishes, but the picture quality and resolution will stay in SD.

 

I'm not sure what you're asking. Are you asking if we can "enchance" the 06 DVD into an archive-quality version?

Because if you are, the answer is NO. Just like you can't really "enhance" the resolution of a security cam the way they do in all too many Hollywood movies.

The 06 discs have substandard quality for the DVD format on which they are stored, which is itself vastly inferior to HD/film.

You might as well ask if we can enhance the VHS version into film-quality.