How Star Wars was saved by editing.

Dykstra -

His side of the story is "You have to build the factory before the first item rolls off the assembly line." He's not wrong. And ILM is still famous for what they produced under his watch.

Lucas's side of the story is that ILM was being run more like a research facility than a factory to produce a product. They were doing good work on the tech but they weren't maximizing the time resources & to get the movie done. They would wait around a couple hours to see the results of a shot when they could have been setting up more stuff during that time. Etc.

Hearing/reading about it now, I get the feeling that they both had valid points. When Lucas came back from England (in mid-ANH) to see how they were doing it was probably worst time he could have picked. They had spent maximum time & money by then and had minimal results. Checking up on them either a month earlier OR later would probably not have left Lucas so stressed.


Kurtz -

Neither him nor Kershner were back for ROTJ. The combination of those two really ran the schedule to hell. (And yes, they also produced an amazing movie.)

Near the end of ESB's production Lucas was forced to go borrow more money to finish it. He gave up some profits to do it and he only narrowly avoided giving Fox some ownership/control in the franchise. He was very frustrated about that. Can you blame him? He risked his whole personal fortune to finance ESB himself instead of taking free money from the studio, he thinks he's got it budgeted well enough to pull it off . . . and then he finds his producer & director getting artsy and running long over-schedule. In 2017 dollars that production would have been costing a couple hundred thousand bucks per day. That money was literally coming out of GL's checkbook.

It's easy to say "It's Star Wars FFS! What was Lucas worried about?" Sequels were not monster hits in the 1970s. The world assumed they would get "Star Wars 2" like Hollywood normally delivered. A totally retreaded plot, fewer resources, etc. Lucas was a Star Wars zillionaire except he wasn't. Almost every dime he had made from ANH (and American Graffiti) was already sunk into ESB. The fact that ESB is another smash-hit is pure hindsight.

Oh, and their replacement for Alec Guinness's Obi-Wan character in this sequel? Now it was a little green muppet. He's got big cute pointy ears. He lives in a jolly little mud-hut in a swamp. He talks like Grover from Sesame Street. He's gonna train Luke to defeat Darth Vader in lightsaber combat. Yeah, that sounds plausible. I mean, the muppet can wave his hand and lift up a spaceship! Doesn't this sound like a good sequel to bet your personal fortune on?
 
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I agree mostly batguy... In addition to that , remember that critics initially trashed ESB... even though SW was by then a big thing. Now, IMO, Dykstra’s argument that “you have to build the factory before the first item rolls” is not entirely true... he could’ve fast-tracked a little bit, but he took his time.
Now returning to the original topic, was SW saved in the edit. I think it always was. I think GL had genius ideas, and is a very creative mind, a good director, and a visionary, but I think he’s a mediocre editor, and a mediocre writer. The more he gets his hands into editing the worse the results are. I.e. ROTJ is the weakest as GL stuck his fingers more into the editing the OT..., and the same with all the PT...
And the writing awgh... all the cast said it in a way... “you can type this , but you can’t say it, who talks like this?”... AOTC: all the Anakin’s pansy’s love ranting... again “who talks lime that!?” . ROTS ... Anakin turns dark side and submissive like he had a push button, over no real stakes to him...
Yes, hindsight is 20/20. And I loved the prequels when they came out cause I was so thirsty for more SW. But the facts remain the movies are done at the editing room, and it’s always needed some hard cold feedback to keep the films honest.


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Also-- there's BTS footage of George and crew after watching the rough cut of TPM and basically had the same result. Only that time, he was surrounded by yes-men. Too bad DePalma wasn't there.
“I think I may have gone too far in some places” or something to that effect lol.
And the full version of that BTS shot shows him trying to figure out what to cut, but the scenes were all so interdependent, he can’t yank anything, even as he’s talking it through. No one in the screening room offers any ideas.

And Rick McCallum is sitting there, hand to his mouth, looking like he’s just seen his home, with his family in it, disappear into a bottomless sinkhole. Speechless, and evidently in shock.

It’s one of my favorite clips, because there’s others of Lucas holding court with his underlings, talking about how all the script points are “like poetry, everything rhymes” and they’re all just smiling and nodding. Not a one saying, “that’s a stupid excuse for repeating things you’ve already done, George.”
 
“George Lucas was sitting on the toilet for an hour this morning. What he’s made is one of the best things I’ve ever witnessed. Everyone will love it. I’m blessed to be part of it.” —Rick McCallum.

Rick retired a day after George sold SW. Wonder why.
 
Vivek, the Orencia ads are out of control in this thread. They're going off non-stop, and even after I stop them, I can't scroll past them.

Don't know who to report this to, so I'll also put, Art Andrews.

Thanks.

The Wook
 
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Pretty much knew everything in the vid from the various books and docs over the years, from the chaotic early cuts to the addition of the all important ticking clock but still absolutely loved this vid.
Very well made and very clear.

Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan. I think that's the saying.
 
Been said so much "captured lightning in a bottle".
Perhaps there were reasons for that, perceived negative things like limited resources, schedule pressures, forced to think in new ways and abandon the originally too complex story or
woefully inadequate old methods.

What would the first film had been like if Lucas had had all the resources of the second trilogy at his fingertips?
 
The problem with George is that is was a fantastic idea guy and an ingenious visionary... but even through his own admission he hates writing the actual story. Like @blakeh1 said, he needs somebody to focus him. He needs somebody there to tell him "this idea isn't going to work the way you want it to, we need to find a different way to express it." I can empathize with that. I'm the kind of person who just wants to tell the story, but am never quite sure how I want to tell it.
 
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@Vivek, the Orencia ads are out of control in this thread. They're going off non-stop, and even after I stop them, I can't scroll past them.

Don't know who to report this to, so I'll also put, @Art Andrews.

Thanks.

The Wook

I have informed the team about this. But please go ahead and post about it in the following thread, so it becomes easier to keep track of similar issues.

https://www.therpf.com/showthread.php?t=283669
 
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Lucas, in fact, did not chickety check himself, and therefor wrecked himself.
 
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I'll just add that both Lucas and Dykstra have acknowledged that during the time of principle photography in England, Lucas and Kurtz were unavailable to oversee ILM's progress. They were getting some reports and phone calls but Lucas was so wrapped up in shooting that he was largely unavailable. And let's remember, this is long before email and teleconferencing so there was no good way to show George what ILM was doing from half way around the world.

Dykstra and crew worked as best they could to get the equipment built and operational. ILM started doing some shots but without Lucas's direct input, who was so particular about what he wanted to see, they were essentially flying blind until he returned. So I always thought it was a little disingenuous of Lucas to throw Dykstra under the bus on that particular point.

But this is one of the things I love most about that first movie. It was such an underdog project and had to overcome so many problems, that it's a minor miracle it turned out so well. That's a credit to all who were involved.
 
Why would Dykstra and crew set-up other shots without first viewing what they've just did? It's fun to do so right now with the tech we have on set, but at the time you had to develop the film to see what was going on with that shot:behave " Yeah, so we spent 3 hours rigging an X-Wing, and the Dykstra-Flex and the lighting and...now we'll see what it looks like as soon as that piece of film returns from the lab"! That's was the pace people...toward the end, the crew was used to the drill and could produce "more" footage, but for some shots it was still some kind of experiment and everyday was trial and error kinda crap.
 
Yeah, but even back in the day, you couldn't just sit around and waste time waiting on film to be developed. You had to move on and keep going.
 
The waiting on shots is the complaint I remember off the top of my head. There were others.

That first year of ILM was a lot of early-20s kids in a warehouse. They fondly remember it being a fun loose atmosphere. Lucas remembers ANH being a nonstop stress load that drove him into the hospital with chest pains at one point. It's not hard to guess how this caused a rift.

As it is, they barely got the movie done and Lucas was famously disappointed & kept tweaking details for years afterwards. If Lucas's very bad reaction upon visiting ILM caused them to work any faster whatsoever . . . then logic says his viewpoint had some validity. I'm not trying to bash Dykstra or the ILM crew but just do the math here. Half the battle of SFX work has always been time constraints. That was true long before CGI.

Lucas & Dykstra were not longtime collaborators who knew each other's quirks in 1976. There are so many factors that can play into these things. It was two people trying to collaborate from opposite sides of the world with little contact. Dykstra may not have realized how much Lucas was going to critique the work once he saw it. Most directors in that era didn't know jack about effects. Their attitudes toward a separate SFX unit were more like "Turn in your work at the end of the semester." With Lucas it would have been more like "Let's see your attempts and I will tell you what to redo." That factor alone might have caused Dykstra to overestimate his time budget by months.

"Not working fast enough" is not always about being lazy. The ILM crew may have misjudged Lucas's priorities on practical things. They may have spent extra time polishing details that Lucas would have elected to leave rough and move on. Etc.
 
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One of the best resources for how the effects for SW got done (apologies to JoMamma_Smurf for veering so far off his thread topic) comes from an old issue of Cinefantastique (double issue, vol. 6, #4 – vol. 7, #1. I'm guessing some of you in this thread already have it. If not, you won't regret grabbing a copy on ebay). The great thing is that this particular issue came out right after SW hit and was just becoming a big deal. Most of the ILM crew were still a little green and not use to being interviewed so what you get is this one-of-a-kind, unvarnished peek at how things really went down.

So to add some context, here's a bit of what Dykstra had to say in 1977:

Interviewer: What was your rapport with George Lucas like?

Dykstra: Communication was a real hassle between myself and the director. Obviously, George didn't want to give up that portion of the show (effects). He wanted to control it and it was very difficult for him to have control while he was in England. While George was away, we were developing a lot of the material that ended up in the show. It was very hard for him to communicate to us what he wanted to see without being there.That was as frustrating for George as it was for us because obviously we could have been more efficient if we had closer communication during that time.

Interviewer: How long did that situation last?

Dykstra: I guess they were in England for two or three months, so there was a fairly long period when we were producing without being able to get direct feedback from him. That's probably when some of the most confusing aspects came up as far as what we were going to do and how we were going to do it.

So like any ambitious, intense project, a little griping and finger pointing occurs after the fact. But here we are 40 years later still talking about it, so I guess those guys did good.
 
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One of the best resources for how the effects for SW got done (apologies to JoMamma_Smurf for veering so far off his thread topic) comes from an old issue of Cinefantastique (double issue, vol. 6, #4 – vol. 7, #1. I'm guessing some of you in this thread already have it. If not, you won't regret grabbing a copy on ebay). The great thing is that this particular issue came out right after SW hit and was just becoming a big deal. Most of the ILM crew were still a little green and not use to being interviewed so what you get is this one-of-a-kind, unvarnished peek at how things really went down....

Here's my scan of the magazine on Star Wars Archives http://www.starwarsarchives.com/1970s/1977-2/nostalgia/magazines/1977cinefantastique/
 
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