Saw the original STAR WARS projected in 70mm mag last night. Wow, it really rocked!

I saw it in a 4, 5, 6 trilogy marathon in Brooklyn a few years ago. I don't know what print it was, but my son who has seen it 1,000 times was noticing all the weird low budget type details. Duct tape on stormtroopers and the misshapen Darth Vader mask.

 

Abrams' quote is, "I've been told that, for reasons I don't quite understand, that that's not necessarily possible." Not too definitive a statement.

There's also the fact that Lucas himself put out the LaserDisc transfers of the original OT cuts as DVD bonus features in 2006. So, even after Lucas had done multiple Special Edition revisions, the most recent in 2004, he was still willing to officially release the original cuts in some form. I think Lucas was asked in one interview if it would be possible to release a remastered version of the original cut of Star Wars, and he basically replied with something similar to what Abrams said here, that it would be a very difficult thing to do, and it's not something they can just pull out of a desk drawer.

I think there was a really long web page I came across that got into the practicality of remastering the theatrical cut of Star Wars, what original film elements may or may not be available, and saying some may have been destroyed when the Special Edition was made, or at other times. But, as we've seen with other restorations, sometimes they get constructed from elements that are not necessarily the original negative when necessary. So I'm guessing Star Wars might need to go through a similar reconstructive process.

The Star Wars: Special Edition Jabba the Hutt scene had to be made off of the inter-positive, according to Steve Williams, because the original negative was lost (I read elsewhere the original negative was destroyed in the process of making the From Star Wars to Jedi documentary, which utilized some of that deleted scene footage). Interestingly, Steve said Lucas didn't even shoot that scene, and that a second unit did it (I don't even know who directed second unit on Star Wars).

Lucas putting in some clause that the original cuts can't be released just doesn't seem likely, considering that he didn't lock in any conditions for making Episodes 7-8-9, and then complained later that they didn't follow his story treatments. We just haven't heard of any conditions at all that he attached to the Star Wars sale, as far as I know.

I think this is the "really long web page" I mentioned, from 2009. There is a huge amount of technical detail here on the process that went into remastering Star Wars for the Special Edition. There are quotes here that explain why there may be a loss of detail from the original film, including the fact that they tried to make scene changes match each other better, and sometimes that meant making cleaner footage conform with scenes including effects shots that were a couple generations further away from the negative. Here's what they wrote about the possibility of restoring the original theatrical cut:

I would be willing to bet a good amount of money that in some years in the future efforts were made to somehow save the original version of Star Wars--from Lucas himself, it may seem, as his Special Edition would have to be somehow worked around in gathering original elements. The negative could be re-conformed to its original configuration, using the original, saved pieces, but this is problematic due to handling issues (and losing more frames). When Robert Harris restored Godfather last year, he had to do it entirely digitally, saying that if any pin-registered mechanism were to touch the negative it would crumble. [60] In Star Wars' case, using scans of the separation masters is perfectly viable, and though IPs and Technicolor prints are not ideal for masters they could be usable if cleaned up digitally. Perhaps the easiest option would be to simply follow the 1997 restoration pattern but in the digital realm: scan the negative in 8K, then scan the stored pre-SE shots or re-comp them, and fill in any damaged areas with IPs or separation masters, reconstructing the original cut, then digitally remove dirt and damage, and finally use a Technicolor print as a color reference for the Digital Intermediate created. Such a product would be theatrically viable, as pristine as when it had been shot, and 100% faithful in image and color to the original release.

It will remain to be seen if the negative to Star Wars is in a salvageable state by the time this happens or if it has become a brittle relic, faded to black and white. It wouldn't be the first time the negative of a famous film has been lost--Criterion's restoration of Seven Samurai, for instance, does not work from a negative, nor did the gorgeous 35mm print of Rashomon that toured theatres this year. With fine-grain masters, IPs, and Separation masters available, the negative need not be the only source for a new master.

When a letter-writing campaign reached Lucasfilm they responded by saying that the Laserdisk was the best source for the originals [62] --which it would be without having to spend money, that is. Robert Harris, the man who had hand-restored Vertigo and Lawrence of Arabia, and later The Godfather, went on record saying he knew there were pristine 35mm elements available for use, and offered his services to restore the film [63]. Lucasfilm did not respond. The efforts of fans and professionals like these will probably result in the aforementioned restoration at some point, if only for the callousness of making money, but it seems that day is not today.

The odd thing is that, in 3 years, it's both the 50th anniversary of Star Wars and the 25th anniversary of Attack of the Clones. So it seems like the Star Wars anniversary would greatly overshadow the AOTC anniversary. Maybe they'll just do a full marathon rerelease of all the movies. If the new "Rey" movie isn't out yet and comes out that year or the next, then they may rerelease all 9 movies with trailers for that movie attached. The Mandalorian movie is supposedly coming in 2026, the year before the big anniversary.

 

I believe our friend @Vidiot has some direct knowledge on this topic…

 

Lots and lots of erroneous data and misconceptions here. I'll answer as bullet points:

• nowadays, movies are "built" as scans and conformed as a complete feature film. All the pieces of Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi still exist and could be used to recreate the original theatrical versions if Disney/Fox was willing to spend the time and money. It's possible some of the O-neg ("pre-optical") elements still exist, which is the kind of thing done in Godfather to make the sh!tty dissolves and titles and stuff look cleaner.

• Lucas didn't make the decision to re-release the late-1990s "laserdisc" widescreen release to DVD and Blu-ray... that was totally a Fox decision.

• all the later restoration was only done on the 1997-1998-1999 versions, because by this point, Lucas more or less owned all the physical content and copyrights, so he called all the shots.

• nobody can say whether or why Disney has not yet reissued all the original theatrical versions.

• few fans ever consider that the sound on the films has been remixed about 20 times (that I know of), so almost every stereo / mono / 6-track / 5.1 / Dolby Atmos version out there is not the one originally released. Some of the changes are very subtle -- some are substantial. If I was involved, I'd make available at least three versions on a Blu-ray release: 1) the original mono print master; 2) the original Dolby Stereo print master; 3) the revised Dolby 5.1 surround (or perhaps the original 1977 6-track print master, remixed to 5.1).

• none of the camera negative has technically been destroyed, but some of it is damaged to the point where it would be difficult (but not impossible) to use for a new Star Wars home video release. I have actually held some of the OCN cans and boxes of the film in my hands, back in 2004. In any cases where a frame was really badly damaged, they could always just scan the virgin/like-new 1970s Interpositive (a contact print struck off the O-neg) and drop that shot in and match it. It's doable, but it'd take months and months of work and millions of dollars to accomplish.

• all I'll say about Robert Harris is that there are people just as smart and just as knowledgeable as he is working at Disney (and similar companies like Warner MPI). A lot of this just boils down to securing the best existing elements and then scanning and conforming it all. Modern scanners are incredibly gentle, and some no longer use metal pins for pin registration: it's all gentle rubber rollers and software does all the pin-registration using digital realignment.

• as I've often said, there isn't even 2K of detail in the original camera negative of Star Wars, because DP Gil Taylor used such heavy diffusion for most of the production, and they were using Kodak 5247 and Panavision anamorphic lenses. Realistically, it won't hit 4K of detail because of the MTF limitations for that combination (contrast, line pairs, focus, and all that stuff). I don't have a problem with them doing the restoration work, but -- as we sometimes say about data -- putting 2 gallons of water in an 8-gallon bucket doesn't give you more water. It's just a bigger bucket. (I've said for a long time that 4K only really makes sense for super-sharp spherical lenses and 35mm or 65mm negative, and that's more rare than you might think.)

• the YCM separation negatives -- which I have seen and we used for some of the 2004 restoration -- have their own issues, because they're down a generation from the O-neg, and they have to be digitally registered together because of age and shrinkage, so you get 3 times as much grain from a YCM composited image. I'd argue you'd get a better picture just going with the O-neg and being careful. When the O-neg is crumbling -- and some of it is scratched so badly, it looks like somebody jammed a fork up to the emulsion -- they could slug in the Interpositive (IP) where necessary. My take is the IP will look better than the YCM seps, but there's a lot of "it depends" to this. [Note that WB MPI scanned everything for Godfather, so that was kind of a patchwork of O-neg, IP, YCMs, and even reference prints for comparison.]

• Star Wars has not "faded to B&W," but it is getting badly faded. Once they realized how badly the first-generation 5247 negatives were disintegrating, they kept them in the deep freeze for decades to halt the progress of the emulsion fading. Basically, the yellow and cyan layers of the emulsion are going away, leaving only magenta... which is why a lot of films tend to look red/pinkish. There's also a lot of "density flicker," which was an enormous problem when I dealt with the negatives in 2004. Lowry Digital fixed all this 20 years ago, but no doubt it could be done much better and cleaner today.

• I asked my supervisors at ILM if we could redo some of the composites and (in particular) the light saber VFX, because they looked awful on the 1976 & 1997 negative scans. They said that technically most of the originals survived, but it would take a ridiculous amount of extra work to redo all that, all time we did not have, and George felt that what we had was "good enough" for the 2004 reissue. I personally went in and cleaned up quite a few garbage mattes in a dozens of shots, and they did pay a VFX clean-up artist to eliminate any stars showing through spaceships (always a problem with hold-out mattes).

• you could theoretically do a 4K Dolby Vision version of all the Star Wars movies, and that would be worth pursuing. Note that the recent Godfather remasters (which are excellent) were all done in Dolby Vision, and I think they were still faithful to the original intent of Gordon Willis. They're still very moody, but there's tons of detail in there, and they stuck to his "prince of darkness" concept.

I think the sad reality is: Disney is struggling to keep the studio afloat and under terrible pressures right now. There's corporate raiders trying to buy and maybe even dismantle the company, and they've lost hundreds of millions (even billions) of dollars in the last few years. I think they have much bigger worries than "should we satisfy the Star Wars fans who want to see the original movies?" It's not high on the list of what to worry about, because they have far bigger problems to deal with in 2024. I have no idea if Lucas included a clause that they could never release the original versions, but -- having gotten to know the guy a little bit over 3 months -- my take is he just doesn't care. I think when he sold Lucasfilm in 2012, he walked away and basically felt, "my work here is done, and all I'm going to do now is enjoy life, appreciate my family, and get my museum built." And that's it.

 

In case you all didn't know, fans around the globe, led by a guy who call's himself Harmy made "despecialized" versions of the original trilogy. Their efforts have been exhaustive and their versions look as close to the original theatrical versions as we could likely hope for, given the reasons alluded to above (although I hope I am wrong about that). These were labors of love and they are not making money on these projects.

Here is what they say about it: "This is a reconstruction of the 1977 theatrical version of STAR WARS. The original shots were painstakingly restored using various sources (listed below) and the film received an extensive shot by shot colour correction based on a fade free 1977 I.B. Technicolor Print.
The remastered (v2.0) version represented a significant improvement in picture quality over the earlier version."

Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released) - Original Trilogy

 

Great information! My opinion is that it would be worth the millions of dollars that it would take, from a purely business perspective. The sales figures would justify it, either theatrically, on physical media or streaming. Cheers would go up in the theater when people see Han shoot first. People would gobble up the physical media, having already lived through the original cuts being made unavailable once. They'd want their own permanent copies. Star Wars is just so popular that even a niche variation of the movies would dwarf sales of almost any other movie restoration you could do. And, whether Disney is doing well or not well financially, it's never a bad time to bring in more profit.

The moral case for doing it is film preservation, and the fact that we don't want a precedent to stand where a filmmaker erases part of an originally released work that became as much of a cultural landmark as the Mona Lisa or the Sphinx. Lucas just went too far here in trying to bury the original cuts, further than any directors or studios really ever have when it comes to a major movie. People have been trying to piece together the original version of Metropolis for decades. We shouldn't accept a status quo where the original version of Star Wars remains unavailable, or even unrestored. The Library of Congress made the right decision in refusing to accept the Special Edition cuts for preservation, when they asked for the originals.

Here is another bit of information on what Lucas said about the original cuts in a NY Times interview conducted during the 2010 Star Wars Celebration. Lucas was dismissive of releasing the original versions, but didn't flatly swear off ever doing so. So this is something else that suggests it's unlikely he banned Disney from releasing them. And, even if he did, they could still ask for his permission and make a deal with him now.

Mr. Lucas said that to release the original versions of these films on Blu-ray was “kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good.”

“You have to go through and do a whole restoration on it, and you have to do that digitally,” he added. “It’s a very, very expensive process to do it. So when we did the transfer to digital, we only transferred really the upgraded version.”

“We’ve been working on them for quite a while,” [this referred to either the Special Editions or the Blu-rays themselves, not the original cuts] Mr. Lucas said, “but still, there are pipelines. Unfortunately, the recent releases get priority over what we call the classic versions of things.”

 

I think he has version 3.o out now. There is also 4k77 by teamnegative1 which did a version using 35mm prints. Their goal is to present it like it looked in theatre's (more grainy). And there is another one called D+77 by oohteedee, which is supposed to look amazing, but leaves in some non-egregious special edition changes.

These are good enough if the studios refuse to offer the originals in HD.

 

The fan-made work is great, but I don't think the public should need to jump through hoops to get a version of the original cuts. Look at the other big special effects movies contemporary to Star Wars. We can buy Close Encounters with three different cuts in the same box. I can buy the theatrical Superman, the director's expanded cut, or a super-expanded TV cut that the director hated. Whatever version the consumer wants, they can find. One exception might be E.T., where Spielberg has now buried his revised 2000s Special Edition version, but no one seems to be looking for that version.

 

Cool, I wasn't keeping up with their latest efforts, good to know. I just want them on blu ray discs so I don't have to run an HDMI cable to my laptop and deal with all that mess.

 

I'd welcome a definitive Star Wars Restored boxset someday from Disney...whenever they get around to it!

 

The other interesting "alternate cut" of a Star Wars movie, one that hasn't ever been released on home media, is the IMAX cut of Attack of the Clones. There was a limit on the length IMAX movies could be back in 2002, so they made a trimmed-down version of Attack of the Clones. Some people have claimed it took out the slowest, or least liked scenes, and was a better movie. I'd be interested to find out if that's the case for myself.

 

I have made that claim that myself. I didn’t like that Owen and Beru were almost completely removed (Beru has no lines at all) but it was otherwise a big improvement in my book.

Here’s the best list I’ve found of the edits:
TheForce.Net - Latest News - The Definitive IMAX Cut Scenes List
However, I know it’s incomplete, because it doesn’t mention the one shot that first appeared in the IMAX cut (and has been in every version since): Padmé holding Anakin’s metal hand in the wedding scene.

Ben Burtt did the edit.

 

Does Anakin still hate sand and do he and Padme still make googly eyes at each other in this cut?

 

Doesn't your TV or 4K player have an USB port? The fan made releases can be copied to hard or thumb drives

 

I think the sand line is gone (“soft and smooth” definitely is) and there’s a whole lot less googly eyes. Not none, but a whole lot less.

 

Burn those to Blu-ray

 

I met that guy after a lecture at an industry restoration seminar about 5-6 years ago, and I told him it was kind of insulting and presumptuous to presume that the fans knew more than the filmmakers when it came to decisions about color. I assured him that we had agonized for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours on the remastered Star Wars and Jedi from 2004. (I didn't do Empire Strikes Back -- that was Natasha Lyonett's work.)

I also told him that trying to work with 8-bit copies from Blu-ray is too "stepped on" to really yield acceptable work. They can noise reduce and sharpen and process and over-process all they want, but it's still not the same thing as working from the original film scans.

I also told him that if it were up to me, of course I'd love for there to be a boxed set of all the Star Wars movies and maybe even individual volumes that had the theatrical release, the later release, and maybe a "refined" version of outtakes and other bits that didn't make it to the finished film. But I wince at fans d!cking around with decisions made by cinematographers and directors. All you wind up with is something that looks different, not necessarily better or an improvement. It's just a matter of opinion. But for me, the filmmaker's opinion matters a lot more than the crazy fans.

I don't dispute that the studios have shown much more respect to important hit films like Godfather, Close Encounters, Superman, Star Trek, and other films like that that came out in multiple editions and got redone several times. It's a good question as to why Disney/Lucasfilm won't do it, but I continue to believe that Disney is beset with a lot of corporate problems right now...

Analysis: Disney is in trouble. Bob Iger has 5 big problems to solve | CNN Business

 

Yeah, well, there isn't a boxed set with the theatrical releases and the laserdisc quality DVDs look terrible on modern equipment, so fan film restoration is our only option. I appreciate all the fan work that has gone into making HD theatrical versions available as I would otherwise be without quality options for watching the original trilogy.

As we've come to realize, there is no singular "filmmaker's opinion". Do you mean their opinion when they made the film? Or 20 years later? Or 30 years later? Because it's been different every time. The color, the content, the audio. For Star Wars, I much prefer what the fans have done trying to return the films to the filmmaker's original opinion. Disney being in a much less likely position to put theatrical restorations out makes the fan work all that more welcome and important.

 

For me it is more about the content changes. Color is often preference. But, if it takes the fans to have Han shoot first, then that is what it takes. I doubt anyone thinks what Lucas did with that scene, which fundamentally changed the character, and looks terrible as Han's image jerks to the side is preferable to the original, or even acceptable. We could go down the rabbit hole from there. I am completely with you on the studio releasing the originals with the quality of the work that was done on the 4k, by professionals, from the original film elements. And we still wait...

 

Is it the most famous theatre in the world?
Where does the name come from ...... is it in Chinatown?
Noticed (and previously) that it featured in the climax of Blazing Saddles.
Any other films where the cinema has featured?

 

DING!!!!