I’d be willing to bet my left nut that if we had the grindhouse print rescanned, with the light offset to deal with the fade, that the colour would be basically the same as the UK print.
LOL… I had a vasectomy two weeks ago; your choice of words have me both smiling and cringing at the same time.
As much as I hate to admit it, a lot of the evidence leads me to similar conclusions but my brain won’t let me believe. As if even if Dr. Who picked me up and took me back to 1980, and we see blue in the cave I’d accuse him off rigging the film before we got there! Because no matter how much I replay the memory fragments of me seeing that film at the drive in theater as a 5 year old I just can’t picture it that way.
I guess with that said, if a moderator feels the need to move this thread into the “Fan Edits” forum I won’t object. Heck… I woke up this morning thinking about your first response… I might just release it over-saturated as Empire: The Wonka Strikes Back edition. 😃
Yeah, our memories are funny things, and our memory for colour is even worse than our memories for events and facts. We remember colours based on what we think an objects inherent colour is. So we remember grass in a film being green, even when the colourist has shifted it to grey or nearly blue.
The amount of people that try to convince me the Tatooine scenes with Luke with the binoculars and Biggs at the cantina etc. were in the version they saw in 1977 is pretty amazing, and I’ve talked to Ben Burtt and those scenes never even had the score laid down, or proper sound effects done, they were only ever cobbled together for a screening for George and some pals after they complained that the film was too hard to follow without a bit more Tatooine background info.
There was simply no possible way that those scenes got into a release print, they were never finished, never scored etc. but people are convinced they saw them in the cinema.
People state their memory is so clear that they can remember comments they made to their friend at the time, what they were eating in the cinema and a slew of other details. But when I ask them what scene was directly before and after it, they suddenly get hazy, when I ask them what they or their friend was wearing, they can’t remember any of that either, asking anything else around their razor sharp memory of the event and oddly those details are also not there.
I’ve been told by multiple crew members that the scramble just to get the cut to the cinemas on time was intense, when I ask if another cut could have been made with extra scenes added or removed from Star Wars, they literally laugh out loud. “When the fuck would we have had the time to do that?” is pretty much the reply. And then the cost of getting another negative conformed and cut and printed and distributed?
Anyway, I’m off topic, the main thing I have discovered is that our memories are terribly unreliable, I have no memory of all the dirt and shit in the composite shots, I thought they looked fantastic at the time 😃
I’m more than happy for anyone to make their own version of empire, with the colours they like and with a level of cleaning that suits them. Personally I’d love my own personal version of Jedi with the Max Rebo band excised, but my main aim is to try and get the original films scanned and preserved, as close to the way they were at release as possible, and answer all those questions about matte lines, colours, errors etc. definitively, so that the information is not lost to time.
There is so much interesting stuff in there, like numbers written across frames, bits of black marker on a few frames, seemingly in an attempt to cover a compositing flaw, and lots of other little insights into the process of film-making at the time.
Sorry if I came across as harsh with my comments re colour, I’m all for people messing with this stuff, my entire career though has been in an environment where people critique the shit out of everything, with no malice or rancour, just to help get the job done to the best standard possible within the constraints, and I forget sometimes that outside production, criticism is taken differently 😃